Metacognitive Awareness and the Subjective Experience of Remembering in Aphantasia
Michael Joseph Siena, Jon Simons preprint
People with aphantasia, who typically report an inability to form mental images, often say their episodic memories are less vivid. In a custom 3D object and spatial memory task that manipulated visuospatial perspective, aphantasic participants performed just as well as controls on all objective measures of memory, including object memory features, despite reporting weaker mental imagery and lower subjective vividness. This suggests aphantasia may be heterogeneous, with some individuals lacking metacognitive awareness of imagery rather than imagery itself. Both groups remembered object features more precisely when encoding and retrieval used a first-person versus third-person perspective, indicating that first-person perspective may enhance the representational quality of scene contents.