Abstract

Aphantasia is a rare way to cognitively perceive the world that involves the inability of people to see things within the mind’s eye. An estimated 2% of the population has aphantasia, which affects major cognitive processes like episodic memory, future event prospection, visual working memory, and dreaming. Even with cognitive processes like this disrupted, those with aphantasia have learned ways around it by developing their own internal toolsets and relying on associations they have accumulated. Aphantasia is underrepresented despite the recent shift for inclusive design and has room for many future assistive tools and technology to aid this population as research and understanding grows. This investigation aims to create a web extension to aid associative memory retention in individuals with aphantasia by augmenting a user’s visual perception of an academic paper as well as providing a framework-building tool to capitalize on spatial memory.