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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Is there a more objective test than telling someone to visualize something and then asking, "Well, could you visualize it?"? For instance, are there visual tasks a person with or without aphantasia objectively could not perform?

Like a psych 101 student, I immediately think I have a touch of any vaguely described mental condition, but I also know I probably don't.

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How about this - Picture an elephant sideways. Don't let the elephant move. Is the trunk on the left or on the right side? If they can't answer, then it's possible they have Aphantasia.

Might want to say "side-on" instead, I rotated the elephant around the wrong axis and was confused for a moment.

Me too. I had the trunk at the bottom. :-p

That's easy to answer without images. Either by reasoning your way out of it, or more plausibly, with this kind of 'geometrical imagery' that comes instead of images. I 'see' a sort of figure-stick elephant and can tell you immediately where the trunk is. Maybe a test involving details of pictures would fare better?

some questions on IQ tests depict rotated images of figures, and ask things like:

> can the two figures in each set be made identical by rotating them in space? [0]

this isn't my domain, so without knowing any better i would kind of expect the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and its abridged version to ask similar questions. but if they didn't, and you wanted to create another test, here's where i'd start:

1. devise a test with a bunch of similar questions (to the one in the above example) of varying difficulty. use these hypotheses:

H_{0}: there will be no difference in performance for people with aphantasia

H_{1}: people with aphantasia will perform worse.

2. find some people with aphantasia and test them to get a baseline.

3. test a random sample.

4. compare results. maybe use a one-tailed test.

[0] link to image: https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-psycholo...

Other commenters and myself feel we have low visualization ability but do well on those tests. In fact, at one point for me they were significantly my best area in a battery of similar IQ-like tests.

The test in the article was extremely easy for me, I guess I can visualize better than most people (I had no idea some people have trouble with that). It's funny, because I've considered myself to be an "auditory" person.

Something I tried to visualize recently, and found quite challenging, was trying to remember this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yW--eQaA2I

I watched it a couple of years ago, and last night I replayed it in my head, but with great difficulty.

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