Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 1-6 Abstract “Autobiographical memory (AM) refers to representations of one’s personal history that integrate self-related knowledge with experienced events (including their interpretation and evaluation) across the extended self (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Levine, 2004; Rubin, 2006). AM is shaped by a multitude of factors, including self-schema, goals, emotion, culture, age, gender, and genetics. The vastness and diversity of past personal experiences captured in our AMs define who we are (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Fitzgerald, 1996; Levine, 2004; Libby and Eibach, 2002), help us relate to other people (Fivush, 2011; Nelson and Fivush, 2004), and… Read More
The ERP correlates of self-knowledge: Are assessments of one’s past, present, and future traits closer to semantic or episodic memory?
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 65-83 Abstract “Self-knowledge concerns one’s own preferences and personality. It pertains to the self (similar to episodic memory), yet does not concern events. It is factual (like semantic memory), but also idiosyncratic. For these reasons, it is unclear where self-knowledge might fall on a continuum in relation to semantic and episodic memory. In this study, we aimed to compare the event-related potential(ERP) correlates of self-knowledge to those of semantic and episodic memory, using N400 and Late Positive Component (LPC) as proxies for semantic and episodic processing, respectively. We considered an additional factor: time perspective. Temporally distant… Read More
Psychological causes of autobiographical amnesia: A study of 28 cases
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
Dynamic changes in large-scale functional network organization during autobiographical memory retrieval
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 208-224 Abstract “Autobiographical memory (AM), episodic memory for life events, involves the orchestration of multiple dynamic cognitive processes, including memory access and subsequent elaboration. Previous neuroimaging studies have contrasted memory access and elaboration processes in terms of regional brain activation and connectivity within large, multi-region networks. Although interactions between key memory-related regions such as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC) have been shown to play an important role in AM retrieval, it remains unclear how such connectivity between specific, individual regions involved in AM retrieval changes dynamically across the retrieval process and how these changes relate to broader memory networks throughout… Read More
Gamma phase-synchrony in autobiographical memory: Evidence from magnetoencephalography and severely deficient autobiographical memory
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 7-13 Abstract “The subjective sense of recollecting events from one’s past is an essential feature of episodic memory, but the neural mechanisms supporting this capacity are poorly understood. We examined the role of large-scale patterns of neural synchrony using whole-head MEG recordings in healthy adults and S.M., who has severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM; Palombo et al., 2015), a syndrome in which autobiographical recollection is absent but other functions (including other mnemonic functions), are normal. MEG was conducted while participants listened to prospectively collected recordings documenting unique personal episodes (PE) that normally evoke rich recollection, as well as a condition including… Read More
Different neural routes to autobiographical memory recall in healthy people and individuals with left medial temporal lobe epilepsy
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 26-36 Abstract “Individuals with medial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) are poor at recalling vivid details from autobiographical memories (AM), instead retrieving gist-like schematic memories. Recent research has suggested that this impoverished recall in comparison to controls may reflect (1) differential engagement of anterior vs posterior regions of the hippocampus (HC) and/or (2) differences between the engagement of the HC vs the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here we examined these hypotheses by comparing connectivity amongst hippocampal regions and between vmPFC and other brain regions during construction (retrieval of a particular event) vs elaboration (retrieval of perceptual detail) phases of AM recall in 12… 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
Search and recovery of autobiographical and laboratory memories: Shared and distinct neural components
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 44-54 Abstract “Functional neuroimaging evidence suggests that there are differences in the neural correlates of episodic memory for laboratory stimuli (laboratory memory) and for events from one’s own life (autobiographical memory). However, this evidence is scarce and often confounded with differences in memory testing procedures. Here, we directly compared the neural mechanisms underlying the search and recovery of autobiographical and laboratory memories while minimizing testing differences. Before scanning, participants completed a laboratory memory encoding task in which they studied four-word “chains” spread across three word pairs. During scanning, participants completed a laboratory memory retrieval task, in which they… Read More
Cortical dynamics of emotional autobiographical memory retrieval differ between women and men
Published in: Neuropsychologia, Volume 110, February 2018, 197-207 Abstract “Retrieval of autobiographical memories entails periods of search, access, and elaboration. Women’s reports of their memories feature more detail and emotional content relative to men’s. A key question is how these gender differences relate to unfolding changes in cortical activity during retrieval. We recorded EEG activity from 32 scalp electrodes as women and men were cued to retrieve positive, negative, and neutral autobiographical memories. Alpha (9–12 Hz) oscillations were prominent at all EEG channels. Alpha coherence between channels was calculated as a measure of ms-level cortical synchrony. Across participants and memory types, a frontal cluster… Read More