There is a continuum called trace memory, some have it more or less than others, I am one of the rare ones with zero trace memory. If I said to you to picture a banana, or picture your moms face, you can assemble in your mind, some sort of image that represents this.
Some I have talked to, with advanced abilities, can take those images and cut them into puzzle pieces, mix them all up and bring them back together. Others just can get an outline of an image or see everything in reds or some specific color palette. Everyone is different, but for me I have zero trace memory.
My mind compensates by remembering things in alternate ways, with phrases, geometry and a very strong short term memory. I actually found this out while I was in high school and my parents sent me to a shrink (everyone in the family was going, we are odd) and I would ask the shrink to do certain things with me like the Rorschach test, and one day I asked to be hypnotized. For the next several sessions I would lie down and the therapist would guide me through a routine that he had used many times in the past to hypnotize, but it did not work on me. So we started talking about why that type of hypnosis does not work on me, and I would said I always thought it was odd that people would use terms like "picture yourself" going down a staircase, or something like that. And basically we realized that I had never pictured anything accept when dreaming. The hypnosis worked very well on other people, and because I laid awake during the whole session, I learned how to hypnotize, and I was successful at hypnotizing about 20 people before I got bored with it.
Anyway, we often believe that those around us think and view the world in the same fashion that we do, but truth is there is quite a bit of variability between individuals.
