What difference does it make if you are good at visual imagery, or, reversely, at spatial imagery?

For one it might influence your career choice, with visualizers being advantaged in the arts, and spatially gifted people advantaged in the sciences or engineering. As mentioned before, it also might have an impact on autobiographical memory, with visualizers more apt to be able to relive their experiences, including a lot of sensory detail.

That can come with a price, though. There might be a linkage between vivid visual imagery and some aspects of mental illness and this point may in turn suggest new forms of treatment for some illnesses. For example, a prominent symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder is the experience of “flashbacks” – immensely vivid and often-intrusive images of a traumatic experience. Both schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease can involve involuntary (but highly vivid) hallucinations. Some people diagnosed with phobias experience troubling images (e.g., images of snakes for someone with ophidiophobia [fear of snakes], images of spiders for someone with arachnophobia [fear of spiders], and so on). It seems plausible that therapies will need to embrace these findings, seeking either to disrupt these troubling images or, in some cases, to ‘re-script’ the imagined event.

And then there are the people with “super” skills, so-called eidetikers. The memories of these people have a photographic quality. This form of imagery is sometimes found in people who have been diagnosed as autistic: These individuals can briefly glance at a complex scene and then draw incredibly detailed reproductions of the scene, as though they really had taken a “photograph” of the scene when first viewing it. But similar capacities can be documented with no link to autism. Research described a woman who could recall poetry written in a language she did not understand, even years after she’d seen the poem; she was also able to recall complicated random dot patterns after viewing them only briefly. Similarly, a 10-year-old eidetiker saw a complex picture for just 30 seconds. After the picture was taken away, the boy was unexpectedly asked detail questions: How many stripes were there on the cat’s back? How many leaves on the front flower? The child was able to give completely accurate answers, as though his memory had perfectly preserved the picture’s content. For more detail see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/quasi-perceptual.html

Let it be clear, though: we know very little about this phenomenon, how frequently it exists and what the underlying mechanisms are. More often seen in the movies than in real life!