Metacognitive Awareness and the Subjective Experience of Remembering in Aphantasia

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Individuals with aphantasia, a non-clinical condition typically characterised by mental imagery deficits, often report reduced episodic memory. However, findings have hitherto rested largely on subjective self-reports, with few studies experimentally investigating both objective and subjective aspects of episodic memory in aphantasia. In this study, we tested both aspects of remembering in aphantasic individuals using a custom 3D object and spatial memory task that manipulated visuospatial perspective, which is considered to be a key factor determining the subjective experience of remembering. Objective and subjective measures of memory performance were taken for both object and spatial memory features under different perspective conditions. Surprisingly, aphantasic participants were found to be unimpaired on all objective memory measures, including those for object memory features, despite reporting weaker overall mental imagery experience and lower subjective vividness ratings on the memory task. These results add to newly emerging evidence that aphantasia is a heterogenous condition, where some aphantasic individuals may lack metacognitive awareness of mental imagery rather than mental imagery itself. Additionally, we found that both participant groups remembered object memory features with greater precision when encoded and retrieved in the first person versus third person, suggesting a first-person perspective might facilitate subjective memory reliving by enhancing the representational quality of scene contents.