Quantifying Aphantasia Through Drawing: Those Without Visual Imagery Show Deficits in Object but Not Spatial Memory

Wilma A. Bainbridge, Zoë Pounder, Alison F. Eardley, and Chris I. Baker. Cortex. 2021.

Wilma Bainbridge and her team at the National Institute of Mental Health wanted to see what was actually happening inside the memory of someone with aphantasia so they came up with a behavioral task to try to measure it directly. They asked people to draw from memory.

Worth noting before you read on...aphantasia was self-reported using the VVIQ questionnaire rather than confirmed through objective testing and participants were recruited from aphantasia Facebook groups and Reddit communities which makes the sample self-selected, and participants drew using a computer mouse rather than pen and paper which may have affected the results.

The Question

If a person with aphantasia cannot form visual mental images does that mean their memory for visual scenes is also different from everyone else's? And if it is different what exactly is missing and what is still intact?

The Discovery

They showed participants three real-world scene photographs and then asked them to draw what they remembered. People with aphantasia drew significantly fewer objects than controls and used far less color in their drawings. They also wrote text labels on their drawings much more often than controls did which suggests they were storing the scene as a list of words rather than a picture. When both groups were asked to copy the same images while looking at them there was no difference at all between groups so drawing ability was not the issue.

Here is where it gets interesting. People with aphantasia placed the objects they did remember in almost exactly the right locations with the right sizes. Their spatial memory was just as accurate as controls. And they made significantly fewer false memory errors than controls. Controls were more likely to draw objects that were never in the original scene at all, things that just seemed like they should be there, like adding a piano to a living room. People with aphantasia stuck to what they actually knew was there.

The Insight

Object memory and spatial memory appear to be two separate systems and aphantasia seems to affect one without touching the other. People with aphantasia remember where things go. They just have fewer of the visual details of what those things look like.

The One Thing to Remember

People with aphantasia are not storing less information overall. They are storing it differently. Less visual detail, more verbal description and just as much spatial precision as everyone else.

The Connection

An earlier post on this site covered the Dawes et al. 2020 study which found that spatial ability was preserved in aphantasia across a broad cognitive profile. This drawing study puts a finer point on that finding by actually measuring it through behavior rather than self-report. The No Picture Needed paper describes students with aphantasia as working from a filing cabinet rather than a photo album. This study gives that idea real evidence. The filing cabinet has accurate location data for everything. It just has fewer pictures of what the objects actually look like. And importantly those files are cleaner with fewer things added in by mistake. That is not a broken memory system. That is a different one.

You can read the Dawes et al. post here.

You can read the full paper summarized in this post by clicking here.