[Buttons840]

What about when reading books?

"It was an average sized room with orange carpet and white walls, entirely empty except for a small circular table with a telephone on top in the middle."

When you read something like that do you not form a coherent mental image of this room?

[istorical]

A lot of people who don't visualize when reading (who may or may not have some degree of mind's eye - it may just be a weaker muscle than those who are extremely visual people) just basically skip over visual description in writing. So when I am reading I would say at least half of the visual descriptions given to me are just filtered out by my brain as 'useless / ignore' and I just skip over / skim to the next part of the sentence / paragraph that returns to things I care about. It's more of a 'I don't care' about what a character's appearance is or what the setting is of a place in the story than a 'I'm taking in these visual descriptions and nothing is happening'.

So like, hearing that the character got out of a car and is at the beach now is enough for me, reading about the white sands, wooden chairs, and crystal clear water is just stuff I ignore, my brain just says 'ok - store fact that character is now at beach. engage mental / factual associations about what beaches are like / what your emotions are around beaches'. But there's not a step where I think 'let's picture that beach'. I'd rather just think about it.

[spdionis]

Somehow the room I imagine never seems to actually fit the description well.

Especially if the text adds details later, I won't be able to add those in most of the time.

For example, for the fragment you quoted, there is no carpet in my room no matter how hard I try to add it. And the walls are made of wood.

[prometheus76]

No. I get a "sense" of what the room looks like/feels like, and I can usually catch clues about the mood the author is intending to portray, but there's no room in my mind.