Some people can't see mental images

I wonder what happens when you e.g. flash a 5 digit number to a person with aphantasia for say 0.1 seconds. Can they read it from memory? Or are they worse at this task than people with mental imagery? How about mentally rotating 3D objects?

I can no longer rotate or even imagine 3d objects.

My lexical memory is very high, and I have long running echoic memory so I can post process audio but a 0.1 second visual flash?

Unless my brain picked it up and had time to parse out the numbers into lexical storage I would not be able to go back and recall it at all.

I don't have congenital aphantasia and it's clear to me that there are certain kinds of background processing still occurring in my subconscious, it's like a unidirectional connection between parts of my brain that was once bidirectional.

that was what i was wondering. if i showed someone a strange sort of asymmetrical 3d object and told them to tell me what it would look like if there were looking at it from the back, it seems like it would be almost impossible to do.

If it's something I'm capable of figuring out, then I'll just know the answer (and I guess I'm pretty good at this sort of thing). I recognize that that's a terrible non-explanation but I can't explain what's happening outside of my awareness. I'm just good with spatial problems. I can't /visualize/ a damn thing but that doesn't appear to be necessary.