What aphantasic drawings tell us about the mind

One of the most intuitive aphantasia studies ever published asked participants to do something almost nobody does in a lab: draw. Wilma Bainbridge and colleagues at the US National Institutes of Health showed 61 people with aphantasia and 52 typical imagers a series of photographed rooms, then asked them to draw those rooms from memory. The drawings were scored by online volunteers on how much they captured the rooms’ objects and layouts.

The finding in one graph

The two groups drew very similar spatial layouts — rooms, walls, doorways, the relative positions of furniture were preserved almost equally well. The difference came with the objects themselves. Typical imagers drew more objects, and added more surface detail to the objects they did draw (patterns, colours, decorative features). Aphantasic drawings were more diagrammatic: the bed is here, the lamp is there, the rug is a rectangle.

Crucially, this was not because aphantasic participants had forgotten the rooms. When the same participants were shown their own drawings later and asked to identify rooms from them, both groups performed comparably. The spatial memory was intact. The sensory-richness memory was the difference.

Why this matters beyond drawings

Three things the study cleared up, which had been tangled before 2021:

1. Aphantasia is not amnesia. People with aphantasia remember what rooms they have been in, how those rooms were laid out, what was in them. They do not forget. They simply do not appear to have vivid visual representations of the surface features of what they remember.
2. Spatial cognition is intact. This had been suspected from work on mental rotation and navigation. Bainbridge added a direct behavioural confirmation — when you hand an aphantasic a pen, the floor plan comes out just fine. The cornerstone guide already says that spatial reasoning is usually untouched; this is one of the studies underpinning that.
3. The deficit is specifically in the object-detail layer. This is a finer-grained finding than most prior work had offered. It is consistent with — though it does not directly test — the later Liu & Bartolomeo framework in which aphantasia is a functional disconnection between control networks and the visual cortex. If the visual cortex is where rich object detail lives, and the aphantasic brain is not calling on that cortex for recall, the pattern of drawings is exactly what you would predict.

The study’s limits

• Self-report recruitment. Participants were drawn from aphantasia online communities; the aphantasia group are people who have identified with the term, not a random population sample. That is a reasonable pragmatic choice and a well-acknowledged constraint.
• Drawings scored by crowdworkers. Robust, replicable, and also subject to whatever biases online scorers bring.
• A snapshot, not a mechanism. The study tells us what aphantasic remembering produces; it does not explain why. That is what the neuroimaging work (Keogh & Pearson, Monzel, Liu & Bartolomeo) is for.