[xpl]

It is an interesting test (I tried it once I read your sentence). Turns out I can imagine a ball rolling off a table without detailing the imaginary scene to have a specific material, texture or sound (and if I wasn't specifically asked, I won't likely picture it).

My imaginary scene clearly had some "spatial sense" though — I saw (but more like "felt") the flat surface of the table, the edges of it, how it is positioned relative to myself, the roundness of the ball rolling, and how it falls off.

[kordlessagain]

The people I've talked to who can visualize say they can consciously see the objects in mind, confirming it looks as if they are looking at it on a phone (as a rough analogy). There is apparently a wide range of ability regarding this, and the abilities seem to be about as common as the limitations, such as not visualizing faces, and seeing historic data in black and white or blocks like Minecraft. Some people can't do motion, some can't do high detail. My mom can do detailed trees with leaves and see landscapes from anywhere she has been, but no creative ones. She also doesn't do faces, nor does she have echoic recall. A recent conversation with a visualizer confirmed they were doing creative rendering of scenes (mesh + texture + lighting) but had low detail on things like tree leaves. They said they were for sure "seeing" the imagery, as if it were a type of "screen" in mind.

I've questioned maybe 200 people about this over the years and when someone starts talking about spatial understanding and not seeing pixels, they aren't really talking about seeing anything in mind, but more understanding it. I can do the "feeling" thing, which I reference as "I have the mesh, not the map". People with Aphantasia appear to hold facts about objects, but not actually generate the imagery where they are conscious of seeing it. It would be a little like having Dalle3 generate an image from a Claude Opus 3 prompt, then uploading it to Claude to look at. It can't do generative images, but can look at them and inference.

Maybe someone that visualizes strongly here can confirm that what you are indeed seeing has aspects of light, shadows, color and the things we consider attributes of "pixels"?

[RaftPeople]

It's interesting that people have a variety of mental capabilities (or styles of internal processing or whatever you call it) but we all seem to be able to solve the same problems.

I wonder if being good at a specific internal style (e.g. visual, verbal, etc.) translates to being good at specific types of problems, or is the core capability an abstract foundational capability and the different styles are really just a method of presentation.