Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or

Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall falls to average. It may be that they're not directly interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct the details.