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This is what I recall from my first time imagining the scenario, I'd have to imagine some more if I wanted to give specific answers.
With all due respect, I don't believe aphantasia is a real thing. The way people imagine things is so varied, weird, strange, and unique that I don't think it makes sense assigning labels. Different people will give varying levels of detail to different parts of their imagination based on their past experiences and knowledge.If you ask someone to imagine a chessboard, someone who plays chess might imagine a specific opening or valid board state, while someone who doesn't might just have a vague blob of chess pieces on a board.
Even with your ball on a table experiment, the experiences people have had throughout the day may give more or less detail to the imagined scenario. I'm fairly certain that the reason I imagined everything so abstractly is because recently I found an artwork with a similar minimalist isometric style that I liked a lot, so it's kind of floating around in my subconsciousness and affecting how I imagine things.
I have aphantasia. The reason this experiment works is because someone with aphantasia will logically think about what they're being asked, but since they're not really "picturing" it, they won't have any answers about details. Color, type, and size of the ball? I have no idea, that information wasn't relevant to my mental checklist. For me, it really does work like a checklist. My brain supplies exactly zero imagery. For some people it's more like a spectrum, where they might be able to have a hazy picture with minimal details.
But aphantasia is 100% real. It's just hard for people to believe it because it's so foreign to the way they're used to thinking, in the same way it sounds unbelievably exhausting to me that regular people are constantly creating movies in their heads.
I think my brain might just be lazy... I skipped over the entire walk to the table part. And just imagined a detached arm pushing the ball on a surface, until it rolled off the surface and that was all.
Thanks for sharing this as well! I also just imaged a detached hand + short bit of lower arm pushing the ball (for which I did imagine it to be of a gray shiny metal slightly larger than the hand)!
And I also imaged a super plain square wooden table so when the questions about the person hit I was super confused wether or not this counted as aphantasia or not (because I am fairly certain that I don't have it...)
You basically just expanded on everything I imagined. I couldn't have described it better.