Can people with Aphantasia perform item rotation/manipulation tasks?

1 min readByViolet Bilodeau

I understand how people with aphantasia can remember visual facts about items, but I’m curious about tasks that involve manipulating or transforming objects mentally.

For example, tasks like:

Mental rotation (imagining an object turning in space)

Estimating distances, angles, or lengths without physically seeing them

Cube net problems (where you’re given a flat pattern of a cube and have to mentally “fold” it into a 3D shape and figure out where each side ends up)

Similar spatial reasoning or visualization tasks often seen in physics classes or IQ tests

For people with aphantasia, how do you approach these kinds of problems?

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Magnus Tveten•recently•edited

"Estimating distances, angles, or lengths without physically seeing them" Errr no... well.. depends.. like I know that my coffee table is 1.5meter square.. so if I was shopping for a table cloth and it said it was it was a runner that was 1meter wide and 2meters long. I would know in my head thats 25cm each side and 25cm hanging off...but I can not picture what that looks like.. I can not estimate to tell you how long my drive way, if I was standing there looking at it.. I could...

Greg Connors•recently•edited

I don’t think that tablecloth is going to fully cover that table, Don’t buy it. Also, how many cars could you line up in your driveway.

Gyokuto Motiduki•recently•edited

I approach these problems through pattern recognition. This method works well for me, but in IQ tests, my scores were lower because of the time limit. It takes more time to logically process the patterns than to simply "visualize" them, even though the result is just as accurate.

Greg Connors•recently•edited

Fortunately, my IQ test have never had that type of question. Are they putting them on them now. Probably attempting to weed us out. (I need to get some better emojis)

Jennifer McDougall•recently•edited

There was some early research with Patient MX that showed aphantasics actually performed similar or better at controls on mental rotation tasks. Here's an older article about it with mental rotation examples for anyone who wants to give it a try and compare notes! https://aphantasia.com/article/science/mental-rotation-tasks

Liên Vũ Kim•recently•edited

Because I study computers, this is not really a problem as I turn the visual problem into a coordinate geometrical one. Just mapping each coordinate to a number and than thinking about the rotational transformations of the numbers is enough for me to figure out, since the wrong answer has no such transformation.

Neal White•recently•edited

Mental rotation is trivial for me. I just "know" it, even though I can't see anything but black in my mind's eye. For example, on the IQ tests which ask you to determine which rotated figure matches the example, I don't even have to look at all the possible solutions. I just know which one is correct, in a fraction of a second. It's not just guessing, because my scores were very high. Also, with jigsaw puzzle pieces, I often just know where a piece goes; not only that, but my fingers can rotate the piece to fit the hole without any conscience thought. I just pick up the piece, and it just fits into place. I'm also good at "cube net" problems and can easily lay out a flat arrangement of polygons which will fold up into the desired shape. I'm not particularly good at estimating distances, but I can accurately find the center point of distances from inches up to 10 feet or so. I'm fairly good at estimating angles. For a recent programing project, I had to create line segments to form characters (letters, numbers, and symbols). I had to trace out the first few on paper, but I was able to do the rest without any sketches. Also, due to my desire to minimize the numeric notation, I directly entered the coordinate values in base-36 arithmetic. Here's an example: case 'A': pts = "0A,6S,CA;3H,9H"; break; case 'B': pts = "0A,0S,8S,CP,CM,8J,CG,CD,9A,0A;0J,9J"; break; case 'C': pts = "CD,9A,3A,0D,0P,3S,9S,CP"; break; How can I do that so easily? I have no idea.