Visual working memory paradigms involve retaining and manipulating visual information in mind over a period of seconds. Evidence suggests that visual imagery (sensory recruitment) is a strategy used by many to retain visual information during such tasks, leading some researchers to propose that visual imagery and visual working memory may be one and the same. If visual imagery is essential to visual working memory task performance there should be large ramifications for a special population of individuals who do not experience visual imagery, aphantasia. Here we assessed visual working memory task performance in this population using a number of different lab and clinical working memory tasks. We found no differences in capacity limits for visual, general number or spatial working memory for aphantasic individuals compared to controls. Further, aphantasic individuals showed no significant differences in performance on visual components of clinical working memory tests as compared to verbal components. However, there were significant differences in the reported strategies used by aphantasic individuals across all memory tasks. Additionally, aphantasic individual's visual memory accuracy did not demonstrate a significant oblique orientation effect, which is proposed to occur due to sensory recruitment, further supporting their non-visual imagery strategy reports. Taken together these data demonstrate that aphantasic individuals are not impaired on visual working memory tasks, suggesting visual imagery and working memory are not one and the same, with imagery (and sensory recruitment) being just one of the tools that can be used to solve visual working memory tasks.

视觉工作记忆范式涉及在几秒钟内保留和操纵视觉信息。有证据表明，视觉意象（感官补充）是许多人在执行此类任务时用来保留视觉信息的一种策略，因此一些研究人员提出视觉意象和视觉工作记忆可能是一回事。如果视觉意象对视觉工作记忆任务的表现至关重要，那么对于没有体验视觉意象的特殊人群，即幻觉症，应该会有很大的影响。在这里，我们使用许多不同的实验室和临床工作记忆任务评估了该人群的视觉工作记忆任务表现。与对照组相比，我们发现无幻觉个体的视觉、一般数量或空间工作记忆的容量限制没有差异。更远，与语言成分相比，无幻觉个体在临床工作记忆测试的视觉成分的表现上没有显着差异。然而，在所有记忆任务中，幻觉个体使用的报告策略存在显着差异。此外，无幻觉个体的视觉记忆准确性没有表现出显着的倾斜定向效应，这可能是由于感觉募集而发生的，进一步支持了他们的非视觉图像策略报告。综上所述，这些数据表明无幻觉个体在视觉工作记忆任务上没有受到损害，这表明视觉意象和工作记忆不是一回事，意象（和感觉募集）只是可用于解决视觉问题的工具之一。工作记忆任务。