Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 134-147 Abstract “Autobiographical amnesia is found in patients with focal or diffuse brain damage (“organic amnesia”), but also without overt brain damage (at least when measured with conventional brain imaging methods). This last condition is usually named dissociative amnesia at present, and was originally described as hysteria. Classically and traditionally, dissociative amnesia is seen as a disorder that causes retrograde amnesia in the autobiographical domain in the aftermath of incidents of major psychological stress or trauma. In the present study one of the probably largest published collections of patients (28) with psychogenically caused autobiographical amnesia, who were assessed… Read More
Episodic future thinking and future-based decision-making in a case of retrograde amnesia
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 92-103 Abstract “We investigated episodic future thinking (EFT) and future-based cognition and decision-making in patient SG, who developed a dense retrograde amnesiafollowing hypoxia due to a cardiac arrest. Despite intact general cognitive and executive functioning, SG was unable to remember events from his entire lifetime. He had, however, relatively spared anterograde memory and general semantic knowledge. Voxel-based morphometry detected a reduction of gray matter in the thalamus, cerebellum and fusiform gyrus bilaterally, and, at a reduced threshold, in several regions of the autobiographical memory network, including the hippocampi. We show that SG is unable to imagine personal future events, but can imagine fictitious events not self-relevant… Read More
Narrative construction is intact in episodic amnesia
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 104-112 Abstract “Autobiographical remembering and future imagining overlap in their underlying psychological and neurological mechanisms. The hippocampus and surrounding regions within the medial temporal lobes (MTL), known for their role in forming and maintaining autobiographical episodic memories, are also thought to play an essential role in fictitious and future constructions. Amnesic individuals with bilateral hippocampal damage cannot reconstruct their past personal experiences and also have severe deficits in the ability to construct coherent fictitious or future narratives. However, it is not known whether this impairment reflects a failure to generate details from autobiographical episodic memory to populate personal narratives or an… Read More
Touching the void – First and third person perspectives in two cases of autobiographical amnesia linked to temporal lobe epilepsy
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 55-64 Abstract “Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) can be associated with a marked impairment of autobiographical memory. This is occasionally its presenting feature. We describe two individuals with severe epilepsy-associated autobiographical memory loss. Both MB and PT were reassured initially that their memory was intact on the basis of standard neuropsychological tests. Both have written detailed accounts of their symptoms. The key neuropsychological features of their cases are the relative normality of performance on standard memory tests, with preservation of semantic memory for impersonal information, in contrast to a profound amnesia for salient autobiographical episodes and an impoverishment of imaginative scene… Read More
The life stories of adults with amnesia: Insights into the contribution of the medial temporal lobes to the organization of autobiographical memory
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 84-91 Abstract “Autobiographical memories are not stored in isolation but rather are organized into life chapters, higher-order knowledge structures that represent major themes conveying the arc of one’s life. Neuropsychological studies have revealed that both episodic memory and some aspects of personal semantic memory are impaired in adults with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage. However, whether such impairment compromises the retrieval and formation of life chapters is unknown. Therefore, we had 10 adults with MTL amnesia and 20 control participants narrate their life stories, and we extracted life chapters from these narratives using a novel scoring protocol. For the retrograde… Read More