Hippocampal-occipital connectivity reflects autobiographical memory deficits in aphantasia

Aphantasia refers to reduced or absent visual imagery. While most of us can readily recall decade-old personal experiences (autobiographical memories, AM) with vivid mental images, there is a dearth of information about whether the loss of visual imagery in aphantasics affects their AM retrieval. The hippocampus is thought to be a crucial hub in a brain-wide network underlying AM. One important question is whether this network, especially the connectivity of the hippocampus, is altered in aphantasia. In the current study, we tested 14 congenital aphantasics and 16 demographically matched controls in an AM fMRI task to investigate how key brain regions (i.e., hippocampus and visual-perceptual cortices) interact with each other during AM re-experiencing. All participants were interviewed regarding their autobiographical memory to examine their episodic and semantic recall of specific events. Aphantasics reported more difficulties in recalling AM, were less confident about their memories, ..., , , # Data from: Hippocampal-occipital connectivity reflects autobiographical memory deficits in aphantasia

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp48](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp48)

**The submitted Data.xlsx file contains the following contents:**

1\. Demographics

2\. Scores from Autobiographical Memory Interviews

3\. Behavioural data from fMRI paradigms

4\. Extracted signal intensities in native space

5\. Signal change of the peaks of activated voxels with 1 mm sphere

6\. Extracted functional connectivity

**## Description of the data and file structure**

**Demographics:**

ID = The catalogue ID for the participants

Age = The age of the participants, ranging from 18-85 (in years)

Sex = The sex of the participants, categorised into M (male) and F (female)

Group = The group of the participants, categorised into Aphantasia and Healthy Control

Education = The years of education reported by the participants, ranging from 10-20 (in years)

VVIQ = Vividness of Visual Imager...