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Comment by IdealeZahlen | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered how spatial reasoning appears to be operating quite differently from other cognitive abilities, with significant individual variations. Some people effortlessly parallel park while others struggle with these tasks despite excelling at other forms of pattern recognition. What was particularly intriguing for me is that some people with aphantasia have no difficulty with spatial reasoning tasks, so spatial reasoning may be distinct from reasoning based on internal visualization.

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I have had this idea about parking a car...

Most people have proprioception - you know where the parts of your body are without looking. Close your eyes and you intuitively know where your hands and fingers are.

When parking a car, it helps to sort of sit in the drivers seat and look around the car. Turn your neck and look past the back seat where your rear tire would be. sense the edges of the car.

I think if you sort of develop this a bit you might "feel" where your car is intuitively when pulling into a parking space or parallel parking. (car-prioception?)

(but use your mirrors and backup camera anyway)

As someone who hasn't had to own a car in over 8 years (lived in NYC) and recently bought a 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe with birdseye view parking it shocks me how uncalibrated my car-prioception is.

It's made me realize that objects are much further from the boundaries of my car when backing into a spot parallel parking. I would never think to get so close to another car if I had to only rely on my own senses.

With that said, I realize there's a significant number of people that are even poorer estimators of these distances than myself. I.e. those that won't pass through two cars even though to me it's obvious that they could easily pass.

I have to imagine a big part of this has to do with risk assessment and lack of risk-free practice opportunity IRL. Nobody is seeing how far they can push or train themselves in this regard when the consequences are to scratch up your car and others' cars. With the birdseye view I can actually do that now!

my theory is that aphantasia is purely about conscious access to visualizing not the existence of the ability to visualise.

I have aphantasia but I would say that spatial reasoning is one of the things my brain is the best at

How does one determine they have aphantasia? How do you know that you are not doing exactly this thing people call visualizing when you perform spatial reasoning?

No idea, but when people say they can visualize an apple and then say it feels like number 1 on that chart, I would say that my experience of whatever I'm doing when I'm 'visualizing' an apple is more like 4 or 5

https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AppleVi...

I can only assume people are trying to accurately describe their own experience so when my experience seems to differ a lot it seems to me that there is more going on than just confusion about wording.

I mean just walking down the street or through a supermarket, it seems to me like 95% of people have no spatial awareness at all. Walking forward while looking to the side or backward.

Either that or they're perfectly capable, they just don't care.

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