Metacognitive Awareness and the Subjective Experience of Remembering in Aphantasia

Siena & Simons — Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2024

This Cambridge study tested whether people with aphantasia have actual memory deficits or whether they just think they do. Twenty people with aphantasia and 27 controls completed a 3D virtual environment task where they had to remember the color and location of objects. Both objective accuracy and subjective sense of how vivid the memory felt were measured separately.

Here is what they found, and it is worth sitting with for a moment. The people with aphantasia performed just as well as everyone else on the actual memory task. Same precision. Same accuracy. But they rated their memory as far less vivid. The memory was there. The feeling of remembering was not. The researchers raise the possibility that some people with aphantasia may not lack mental imagery so much as they lack awareness that it is happening.

This is not a settled question. Other studies have found real memory deficits. This one did not, and the researchers are honest about not knowing exactly why the findings differ across studies.

If you remember one thing — people with aphantasia may be significantly underestimating what their memory is actually doing. The filing cabinet has more in it than they think.

If you have read No Picture Needed, here is the connection to the paper...

The guide describes students who stopped cold at the moment a task required imagery, not because they lacked the information but because they had no way to access or verify it. This research points at exactly that gap, the difference between what the brain has stored and what a person can consciously report having. The information is there, they are having trouble accessing it. This study is the closest thing yet to proof.

There is also something here for anyone who has watched a student with aphantasia insist they don't remember something, then surprise everyone when the right question unlocks it. The guide puts it this way. "Remember when we did the experiment?" pulls up nothing. "What were the steps of the experiment?" might surprise you. This paper suggests that surprise may have a neurological explanation. The information was always there. 

I wish this blog had a “Shout it out loud” button. If it did, I would put it right before the prior paragraph. You need to figure out what words unlock the memory. That answers you get when you say “Tell me about an elephant” vs “list words that you associate with an elephant” will make you think you are talking to two different people.