I am far along the aphantasia line and have spatial thoughts. They lack visual qualia. I can't directly imagine visual features like color or brightness. It's

I am far along the aphantasia line and have spatial thoughts. They lack visual qualia. I can't directly imagine visual features like color or brightness. It's more like being aware of the spatial positions and structures. Often, but not always, in a volumetric stage reachable by my hands. I too can think of the cube as folded parts, i.e. one forming the top+front+bottom which the problem states are red, and one forming the left+back+right which the problem states would be blue. I don't really fold or unfold them as some sort of imagined movement, but am simultaneously aware of their in situ and flattened forms. For the cube as a whole, rather than seeing and rotating it, I have a direct sense of the manifold and can attend to the faces one at a time. It is my attention that "moves" around this stage a bit like a 3D cursor, not an object or view being rotated or shifted. The faces don't have color, but I can attend to them in the order of the problem description to count off the "red" faces. I can also count the remaining unlisted faces or just re-count all faces if I need to confirm my tacit knowledge that a cube has 6 faces. Both those approaches only work well for relatively simple structures like the cube. It is based in tacit knowledge I have about cubes, boxes, and rectilinear structures. If you asked for some arbitrary polyhedron, I could have a more amorphous sense of the shape and the fact it should be faceted, with ambiguity about its actual shape. I could not count nor attend to individual faces. I can't generalize to reason about origami paper/shape correspondences. I would need actual paper models for trial-and-error. I can also think about dynamic systems with objects moving or even changing shape, but I wouldn't normally use that to "inspect" an object. My attention jumps around the static stage to examine it piecewise. There is no occlusion to avoid nor a viewing angle that improves my access to the topology information. I only think about movement when I am trying to examine a dynamic system's characteristics. And this can flip between thinking of actual animation and something more akin to having a static awareness of the motion vectors or paths.