Emma Breed

Hi, thanks for the paper. It gives a logical structure as to why it is not true to say that aphantasics cannot perform tasks which might be assumed to require visualisation. As an aphantasic this seems obvious to me, otherwise a significant proportion of the world population would not be able to complete these type of tasks! It would be useful to include current estimates of the % of population that have aphantasia or are on the phantasia spectrum. For me the key / most interesting sentence is "aphantasics might make use of their spatial sense, in order to solve mental rotation tasks, and they might make use of semantic memory when answering the question about the different shades of green." Can you expand on what these techniques are, how they differ from visualisation, and how a person with or without aphantasia (or somewhere in between) might be using these techniques to complete the tasks you describe. Perhaps visualising people are also using these techniques without realising, to compliment the visualisation?