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Abstract
<p class="first" id="d1843808e103">Congenital aphantasia is a recently characterized
variation of experience defined
by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, in individuals who are otherwise
high performing. Because of this specific deficit to visual imagery, individuals with
aphantasia serve as an ideal group for probing the nature of representations in visual
memory, particularly the interplay of object, spatial, and symbolic information. Here,
we conducted a large-scale online study of aphantasia and revealed a dissociation
in object and spatial content in their memory representations. Sixty-one individuals
with aphantasia and matched controls with typical imagery studied real-world scene
images, and were asked to draw them from memory, and then later copy them during a
matched perceptual condition. Drawings were objectively quantified by 2,795 online
scorers for object and spatial details. Aphantasic participants recalled significantly
fewer objects than controls, with less color in their drawings, and an increased reliance
on verbal scaffolding. However, aphantasic participants showed high spatial accuracy
equivalent to controls, and made significantly fewer memory errors. These differences
between groups only manifested during recall, with no differences between groups during
the matched perceptual condition. This object-specific memory impairment in individuals
with aphantasia provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object
versus spatial information. The study also provides an important experimental validation
for the existence of aphantasia as a variation in human imagery experience.
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