Abstract
Individuals with aphantasia, a nonclinical condition typically characterized by mental imagery deficits, often report reduced episodic memory. However, findings have hitherto rested largely on subjective self-reports, with few studies experimentally investigating both objective and subjective aspects of episodic memory in aphantasia. In this study, we tested both aspects of remembering in aphantasic individuals using a custom 3-D object and spatial memory task that manipulated visuospatial perspective, which is considered to be a key factor determining the subjective experience of remembering. Objective and subjective measures of memory performance were taken for both object and spatial memory features under different perspective conditions. Surprisingly, aphantasic participants were found to be unimpaired on all objective memory measures, including those for object memory features, despite reporting weaker overall mental imagery experience and lower subjective vividness ratings on the memory task. These results add to newly emerging evidence that aphantasia is a heterogenous condition, where some aphantasic individuals may lack metacognitive awareness of mental imagery rather than mental imagery itself. In addition, we found that both participant groups remembered object memory features with greater precision when encoded and retrieved in the first person versus third person, suggesting a first-person perspective might facilitate subjective memory reliving by enhancing the representational quality of scene contents.
What This Study Is About
Researchers wanted to know if people with aphantasia—the inability to "see" pictures in their mind—actually have worse memories for details, or if they just lack the "mental movie" feeling when they remember the past.
How They Studied It
The team recruited 20 people with aphantasia and 27 people with typical mental imagery (the ability to picture things in your mind). Participants entered a 3D virtual world on a computer where they had to memorize the exact colors and locations of various objects.
Sometimes they viewed the objects from a first-person perspective (like looking through their own eyes) and other times from a third-person perspective (like a bird’s-eye view). Afterward, they rated how "vivid" or clear their memory felt before being tested on the exact details.
What They Found
Even though the aphantasic group rated their memories as much less vivid, they were just as accurate as the control group! They could pinpoint the exact shade of a color or the specific spot an object sat on the floor with high precision.
The researchers also found that both groups performed better when they remembered things from a first-person perspective. It turns out that while people with aphantasia lack the "visual playback," their brains are still storing the data just as well as anyone else.
What This Might Mean
This suggests that aphantasia might not be a "broken" memory system. Instead, it might be a "metacognitive" difference—meaning the brain is doing the hard work of recording data behind the scenes, but the person isn't consciously "seeing" the result.
Think of it like a computer running a complex program perfectly, but with the monitor turned off. You can't see the graphics, but the data is all there! However, because this was a relatively small study, we can't be certain yet if these results apply to every single person with aphantasia.
One Interesting Detail
Some participants with aphantasia were actually surprised by their own success! They reported that they didn't know *how* they knew the right answer, but they just "knew" where the object belonged, even without a mental picture to guide them.