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This post just made me realize I have aphantasia and I spoke to my partner what she can imagine and then did the apple test.
I was aware of the term but never bothered to investigate. And I'm seemingly affected. What a wild ride.
I have to admit, I don't quite get the apple test. I don't even need to close my eyes, I can imagine a perfect image of an apple with open eyes. I can rotate it, look at little imperfections in detail, cut it open, do whatever. The same goes for just about anything that can be imagined. But it happens on a secondary plane to my normal eyesight, a third eye so to speak. If I close my eyes, I see nothing more than I do with open eyes. I would personally say I have excellent 3d imagination, but going by the test literally would lead to the conclusion that I have aphantasia?
I’m in the same boat as you, description-wise. Neither of us have aphantasia, the literal description is just poor.
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This is interesting to me. What do you have in your head when you imagine a person you knew as a child? Do you not see them in your mind's eye in any way?
It's mostly the concept or a random narrative involving the person. Probably not even a real memory.
When I tried to explain a room we both know then I can iterate around the room clockwise and say the big items in the room but at no point do I have any visuals generated. Being very much influenced by LLM: I can generate an itemization of furniture, but merely because I have a spreadsheet I can go through, but it's all generated on the fly but when my eyes are closed it's just blank.
My partner, based on the red apple test, also doesn't have strong visualization skills. What I noticed is that when my eyes are open I can at some level generate images based on the visual stimuli that is currently present.
Again influenced by AI: Like that Google thing from years back that saw dogs everywhere. But not that obvious and it's still not really visually present but somehow I can get closer to a "visual feel" that way.
What's funny is that I'm partial on the conspiracy train that other people may have the same stimuli but are just making up being able to see and they just claim to be able to see something in their mind's eye. I could fake a detailed red apple and invent blemishes and such. They wouldn't be stable over a period of time because there is no actual "visual" reference but I don't know if the non-aphantasiacs have a stable reference. My wife says her blurry red apple morphs.
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