LEARNING PATTERNS
Does aphantasia affect reading comprehension?
Sometimes, and the pattern is specific enough to be a real clue. Students with aphantasia typically track plot, character motivation, and cause and effect accurately, and their comprehension can be excellent. Their answers tend to sound factual rather than descriptive, not because they read carelessly but because they didn't experience the book visually.
Where it gets harder is fiction that relies on mental simulation. When a sentence describes someone grabbing a handle and pulling hard, most readers unconsciously run a quick physical simulation of that action as part of how the meaning lands. Without that simulation, comprehension becomes a little flatter because the words are understood but the action behind them isn't fully felt.
The clearest signal is a gap between nonfiction and fiction performance, where the nonfiction test goes fine and the fiction test falls apart. It's worth knowing this same pattern applies to math word problems, because the farmer's field and the train leaving the station both require mentally simulating a physical scene before the math even starts, and that simulation is the part that doesn't work.