Connections Between Learning Arithmetic and Object Visual Imagery Ability in Elementary School

Connections Between Learning Arithmetic and Object Visual Imagery Ability in Elementary School

This one asks a question that will feel very familiar if you've ever watched a kid struggle with multiplication tables and wondered if something else was going on. Gulyás looks at whether students with aphantasia have more trouble memorizing times tables, specifically because so many teaching methods tell kids to "picture it in your head."

The research is honest about its limits. It's a non-representative survey and the findings are preliminary. But the core observation lands hard. Telling a student to visualize the multiplication table is just a bad strategy if that student has no visual imagery. The paper finds some support for the idea that students with aphantasia are more likely to recalculate rather than recall multiplication facts, which isn't wrong, just slower.

For teachers this is a concrete, practical reminder that the method and the goal are not the same thing.

If you remember one thing: "See it in your head" is a teaching method, not a math skill, and for some students it's the method that's broken, not the student.

Link to the paper is here