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Impoverished recall of sensory details along infrequently travelled routes in aphantasia

Li and colleagues · Memory

In an online study, 65 people with weak or no imagery and 72 typical imagers described a walking route they took at least weekly and one taken only once or twice in three years. For the familiar route, both groups gave similar numbers of spatial, object and sensory details. For the rarely traveled route, the group with weak or no imagery gave a smaller share of sensory details, nearly all about how things looked. The authors suggest repeated exposure lets people without imagery recall as much detail by other means, such as words and meaning.