I’ve read that imagination (in the sense of conjuring mental imagery) is a spectrum, and I’ve encountered a test which some but not all phantasic people fail.
I don’t recall the details enough to pose it directly, but I think I do recall enough to reinvent the test:
Ask the subject to visualize a 3x3 grid of letters.
Provide the information required to construct the visualization in an unusual order, for example top-to-bottom right-to-left for people not accustomed to that layout.
Ask them to read the 3-letter word in each row.
Test details guessed above may not properly recreate the ability to distinguish levels of imagery. My hazy memory says the words might be top-to-bottom? Or the order of providing the letters might matter?
Someone actually seeing the image you’ve requested they construct would be able to trivially read off three words. …but someone without mental imagery or with insufficient mental imagery may fail.
I recall discovering that I really can’t imagine more than about 2 letters at a time before adding additional detail to my mental visual workspace forces the loss of something else. That seems pretty poor, and tracks with my inability to imagine human faces—my theory is that a specific face requires more details to distinguish it from other faces than the maximum amount of detail I can visualize.
I didn’t know about that test! Pretty neat, and it seems better than the “color of the apple” one
To be clear I am not pushing back on the notion of aphantasia, although I’m not necessarily a fan
And I don’t think I have aphantasia
My point was more about metaphors, and about the fact that much more of our communication relies on them than we realize
That’s not an official test, just something I thought up!
I’ve read that imagination (in the sense of conjuring mental imagery) is a spectrum, and I’ve encountered a test which some but not all phantasic people fail.
I don’t recall the details enough to pose it directly, but I think I do recall enough to reinvent the test:
Ask the subject to visualize a 3x3 grid of letters.
Provide the information required to construct the visualization in an unusual order, for example top-to-bottom right-to-left for people not accustomed to that layout.
Ask them to read the 3-letter word in each row.
Test details guessed above may not properly recreate the ability to distinguish levels of imagery. My hazy memory says the words might be top-to-bottom? Or the order of providing the letters might matter?
Someone actually seeing the image you’ve requested they construct would be able to trivially read off three words. …but someone without mental imagery or with insufficient mental imagery may fail.
I recall discovering that I really can’t imagine more than about 2 letters at a time before adding additional detail to my mental visual workspace forces the loss of something else. That seems pretty poor, and tracks with my inability to imagine human faces—my theory is that a specific face requires more details to distinguish it from other faces than the maximum amount of detail I can visualize.