A recent proposal is to characterise aphantasia as an episodic memory condition. Aphantasics show difficulties in recalling details of situations from their distant and recent past. They are less confident about their episodic memories and also seem to be less emotionally affected by them. But can we really say that aphantasics have a poor episodic memory? The aim of this contribution is to analyse in depth four strands of research (i.e. pictorial memory tests, memory accuracy, hippocampal activity, and SDAM) that challenge this idea and emphasise the necessity for a more in-depth understanding of episodic memory in aphantasics. Moreover, these studies prompt a reflection on the very definition of episodic memory and its relationship to both mental imagery and imagination, which may be weaker than previously thought, to the extent that aphantasia is primarily understood as a mental imagery condition and that aphantasics have troubles with imaginative projection into both future specific scenarios and atemporal situations.
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.
