I imagine there's a spectrum and certain strengths are at opposite ends of a gradient. I have weak (but existent) visual recall and imagination, and strong spatial awareness, with a strong preference to text over visual learning. Perhaps strong spatial relationship awareness is one end of a gradient and the other end is strong visualisation.
This is interesting because I never really thought about spatial and visual abilities as opposing- I'd say I'm subpar at both but very strong with language, so I sort of assumed that was the tradeoff. I always thought of daydreaming for example as "hearing" fake conversations with people. Was very surprised to find out that other people did not think the same way. I'd love to see more research on this stuff. But even just reading other people's accounts here has been informative IMO.
There are a couple of quite interesting studies about the malleability of some of our cognitive abilities, such as spatial reasoning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17894600 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22663761 for example.