Can you picture a full object or do you just imagine part?

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For example, if you try to imagine a chair, do you see all if in your mind? Or just a part of it? Or if you picture a letter of of the alphabet, do you see it all?

I can't see the full anything. Rarely I get a fleeting glimpse of something I try to mentally imagine but then it disappears. When I try with letters, tables, chairs, etc I see only a part. A chair leg, a corner of the seat part with whatever pattern cloth it is made of, the top left corner of the letter R, etc. I usually see the top corner of letters first.

It would be a lot easier to describe things to people if I could mentally see it all. Any idea how I can do that?

What do you see when you imagine things?

When I thought of chair, I saw the full chair, when I thought of the letter A I saw the whole letter.

Notably the chair was a dining chair (and I have my feet up on one which is infront of me right now) and the letter was a big, red, bold letter 'A'.

When I think of things in general I see something that I can only describe as a scene or a photo.

I must note that I am not diagnosed with an ASD although I wonder if I am on the spectrum.

It varies for me. I saw the whole A but with the chair the seat was clear, the back out of focus, and the legs almost nonexistent.

Depends upon what it is. I can clearly picture a letter but anything too complex and I just get lost.

Never thought of that. I see a partial structure - just some abstract lines. The minim necessary to define the object. Maybe two lines for a capital A, three lines for a chair. Then I see more detail as I focus on, but more often I focus out.

maybe this explains why I don't like lower case "a." I learned with a system called "ITA" and basically learned two letter "a"s. Efficiency matters to me, and the letter "a" takes up too much mental space.

A chair is a chair - no problem.

A system ... I usually imagine it as a functional sum of its functional components. Not as they look, but as they work.

It's hard to explain, however.

The letter A or chair are no problem... however it has to be a specific chair, not just generic 'chair'. e.g. dining chair made of wood with straight legs, fabric back and seat or office swivel chair with chrome stand black wheels etc.

One of my stims / OCD habits is counting and generating geometric shapes in my head. I often draw a hypercube one line at a time until I can see the whole structure, sometimes I just imagine the completed thing and rotate the three dimensional wire model in my mind. I make various other geometric shapes too. However, I'm somewhat atypical - an extreme visual thinker/learner and visualise highly complex systems that are impossible to describe using words.

No unless I focus really hard. When I read words I get glimpses of what the object looks like, but its not complete.

Yeah that sounds like me. I've seen things (mostly on TV) where someone is trying to help someone remember some event they've seen and they have them picture it and then pick out details, some of which they didn't remember before. That would never work with me. I'm pretty sure I'm sure remembering a list of things I saw in some situation and then reconstructing the image from that. It seems that other people can remember the image and then pull details out of it.

I could see all of the chair. But I can also imagine just part of one. Or a letter or number etc....

When you imagine this part of a chair, can you not make your imagination expand out and then see the whole?

Is it like you see details (maybe the top half of the letter A) and you know the horizontal part and the rest of the bottom half are needed so you mentally pull them into the letter?

Like you mentall see part of a chair but then have a secondary imagination that sees the rest of the chair and pulls it into the first one. Probably not a clear explanation to anyone but me though.

Uhm ... if I try to imagine a chair, I can't.
It's like ... uh ... I get the general idea of a chair. I know what a chair is.

But unless you ask me specific questions about it I can't tell you what that chair looks like.

And I won't have the image of the chair until I've answered all those questions ... when you ask the question I'm not "looking at" my imagined chair and answering the questions, but rather thinking of an answer to your question and the putting those answers together into an image of a chair.

Does that make any sense at all?
I think it's a rather odd answer, and I didn't realise this until I tried to imagine a chair and realised I couldn't.... but maybe others will prove that it's not as odd as I think.

On the other hand, if you ask me to remember a chair from a particular occasion ... I would remember the whole chair as an "idea". But I'm not sure that I would not necessarily be able to describe it without specific questions.

It depends on a few things--usually:

how big/small the object is,
how complicated it is (shapes/angles, colors, patterns), and
how many times I've looked at it in real life.

I can only see a whole chair for more than a fraction of a second if, when I saw it in real life, I was able to see all of it as a whole. Normally I see things in pieces, and may or may not be able to put all the pieces together to see a whole.

When I first think of something like the chair or the letter, I get a very vague general out-of-focus detail-less version of it, and as soon as I try to focus on it for details, then I can only see a small part of. The more detailed, the smaller the part. I can move mentally imaging it part by part, but they are fractured images and I can't put them together as a whole anymore unless I try to start the process from the beginning and back to the vague abstract image of it. If I try to imagine the whole with the any level of details, I lose the picture entirely.

I suppose some people can. When I try I see part of a chair and when I try to add another piece I lose the first part that I saw. I've tried and still can't. I also get a headache when trying. I don't know about you but if I try to cross my eyes it hurts both them and my head. It's that same headache and eyes hurting.

I know one personn with AS who easily sees all of objects. I wonder what the majority of people with ASD see (details or full objects) and what the majority of NTs see. Any ideas?

When I imagine something I see a still photograph of it. My focus is usually on one subject though.