Dissociation between verbal and autonomic measures of memory following frontal lobe damage

Abstract

Our findings provide further neuropsychological evidence that overt and covert forms of face recognition memory are dissociable. In addition, the failure to detect an autonomic correlate for the false recognition errors and misidentifications in J.S. suggests that these memory distortions were not related to the spurious activation of stored memory representations for specific familiar faces. Instead, these incorrect responses may have been driven by the sense of familiarity evoked by novel faces that had a general resemblance to faces encountered previously. We propose that false recognition in J.S. resulted from the breakdown of strategic frontal memory retrieval, monitoring, and decision functions critical for attributing the experience of familiarity to its appropriate source.

Selection of Currently Relevant Memories by the Human Posterior Medial Orbitofrontal Cortex

“…We found that patients with anterior medial OFC lesions confabulate only for a brief period, usually a few weeks (Schnider et al, 2000). In contrast, patients with lesions of the posterior OFC and basal forebrain typically confabulate for several months (Schnider et al, 1996a(Schnider et al, , 2000, occasionally even for years (Rapcsak et al, 1998). These clinical observations, in accord with the present study, indicate that the area critical for the distinction between mental representations of ongoing reality and currently irrelevant memory traces is the posterior medial, rather than anterior medial, OFC.…”

The Executive Control of Face Memory

“…In particular, several patients have been described who showed increased false recognition in retrograde memory paradigms that involved judging whether they had ever seen a novel face before, or required familiarity/fame decisions using sets of stimuli that included both famous and unfamiliar faces [61][62][63][64][65][66]. In these experimental situations, the spurious sense of familiarity triggered by novel faces was occasionally accompanied by the retrieval of false biographic information resulting in frank misidentifications.…”

“…Note that the cognitive requirements of retrograde face memory paradigms are similar to what people must do to reach recognition decisions in everyday life: assess the familiarity of the face and attempt to retrieve unique, identity-specific contextual information about the person encountered. In fact, patients with frontal lobe damage sometimes demonstrate false recognition/misidentification in reallife settings by mistaking unfamiliar individuals for famous people or personal acquaintances [61][62][63]81,82].…”

“…The patients' willingness to uncritically accept false and often implausible identity-specific contextual information is consistent with the proposed impairment of executive memory monitoring and verification functions. Additional evidence of defective monitoring comes from observations that frontal patients with false recognition/misidentification exhibit anosognosia for their face memory impairment and have difficulty judging the accuracy of their recognition decisions [56,[61][62][63].…”

“…While memory loss for familiar faces is associated with temporal lobe lesions, false recognition and misidentification of unfamiliar faces is observed in patients with damage to prefrontal cortex [61][62][63][64][65][66]. In order to explore the cognitive mechanisms responsible for these memory distortions, in this paper we review pertinent neuropsychological findings from two subject populations with increased susceptibility to false facial recognition: patients with focal frontal lobe lesions and normal elderly individuals experiencing an age-related decline in frontal executive function.…”