Remembering without mental imagery: A case study of aphantasia

This study explores the memory performance of D.C., a 51-year-old man with congenital aphantasia. Neuropsychological tests, anatomical MRI, and performance in two recognition tasks were collected. Statistical analyses adapted for case study design were used to compare D.C.’s responses with those of the control group. Neuropsychological tests confirmed a total absence of mental imagery in D.C. The aMRI showed an anomaly in the posterior occipito-parietal regions. During face recognition, D.C.’s performance dropped when the faces to be recognized expressed fear rather than neutral expression. During associative recognition, D.C. presented normal performance for semantically related pairs while his performance became null for semantically unrelated pairs. D.C.’s memory depends primarily on the nature of the material to be remembered and fails when memory cannot rely on the propositional format but only on visual reconstruction. Aphantasia is related to the incapacity to construct episodic visual simulation, whether in the field of memory or imagination.