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I'd say it's the other way around, people with Aphantasia trend towards tech. Especially software is very abstract, you can visualize parts of it in your head but it's often not enough precise or just too complex. Even a small imprecision makes it pointless, which is very frustrating. Compare that to something like (UI) design, architecture, animation, visual effects etc. Where even rough visualizations help a lot.

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Do people without aphantasia actually visualize for loops, class hierarchies, design patterns, etc…?

If not it would be easy to explain the result of the “visualize an apple” test. It’s just like visualizing a “for loop”. You’ve got a good idea of what’s it like and yet visualize absolutely nothing.

I do visualize images I have seen in the past that represent class hierarchies, I can visualize UML representing design patterns, and also can visually compose these UMLs, I can even write code in my head as I see it on the screen, for example I can change background color or font. I can only do it for small snippets, but I do see them they are not just text. Whenever I want to solve a high level design problem I actually see the systems stylized, a cache, a database, client, server, arrows between them, the same way they appear on the screen. I can easily imagine all kinds of dashboards charts and whatnot. All these to some degree of complexity, I need to make some effort to actually take a mental picture of the screen remember and visualize it after a period, unless is something I see every day. So yes people can use images to do their work every day as programmers.

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