Experience-near but not experience-far autobiographical facts depend on the medial temporal lobe for retrieval: Evidence from amnesia

Abstract

This paper addresses the idea that there may be two types of autobiographical facts with distinct cognitive and neural mechanisms: "Experience-near" autobiographical facts, which contain spatiotemporal content derived from personal experience and thus depend on the medial temporal lobe (MTL) for retrieval, and "experience-far" autobiographical facts, which are abstract memories and thus rely on neocortical brain regions involved in retrieval of general semantic memory. To investigate this conceptual model of autobiographical fact knowledge, we analyzed the nature of autobiographical facts that were generated by 8 individuals with MTL amnesia and 12 control participants in a recent study of identity and memory [Grilli, M.D., & Verfaellie, M. (2015). Supporting the self-concept with memory: insight from amnesia. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 1684-1692]. Results revealed that MTL amnesic participants generated fewer experience-near autobiographical facts than controls. Experience-far autobiographical fact generation was not impaired in amnesic participants with damage restricted to the MTL, but there was preliminary evidence to suggest that it may be impaired in amnesic participants with damage to the MTL and anterior lateral temporal lobe. These results support a cognitive and neural distinction between experience-near and experience-far autobiographical facts and have implications for understanding the contribution of autobiographical fact knowledge to self-related cognition.

External details revisited – A new taxonomy for coding ‘non‐episodic’ content during autobiographical memory retrieval

“…The external content details were then reclassified into one of four categories, Specific Episodes (SE), Extended Episodes (EE), Personal Semantics (PS), and General Semantics (GS). The motivation for these categories was based on evidence for their potential cognitive and neurobiological parcellation (Conway & Pleydell‐Pearce, ; Grilli & Verfaellie, , ; Renoult et al ., , ) and to capture the full episodic‐semantic spectrum of external details (i.e., from highly specific events to over‐general semantic detail).…”

Supporting older and younger adults’ memory for recent everyday events: A prospective sampling study using SenseCam

“…Recent advances have suggested that in fact some types of semantic AM (e.g. repeated events, autobiographical facts containing spatiotemporal content) are closer to episodic memory than to semantic memory, in terms of both phenomenological experience at the time of retrieval, and the brain areas that are implicated (Grilli & Verfaellie, 2016;Renoult et al, 2012). Accordingly, one might question the importance of a strict definition of episodic AM, particularly in older age.…”

Impaired personal trait knowledge, but spared other-person trait knowledge, in an individual with bilateral damage to the medial prefrontal cortex

“…Philippi and colleagues (Philippi, Tranel, Duff, & Rudrauf, 2015) also demonstrated that impaired autobiographical fact knowledge retrieval was associated with lesions to left MTL, whereas impaired episodic memory retrieval was related to lesions to right MTL. Grilli and Verfaellie (2016) further found that autobiographical fact retrieval was impaired in a group of adults with amnesia secondary to isolated MTL lesions, only if such knowledge had not been fully extracted from the spatiotemporal context from which it was derived. Lesion studies have further implicated the lateral temporal lobe (Grilli & Verfaellie, 2014; 2016) and prefrontal cortex (Philippi et al, 2015) in autobiographical fact retrieval, consistent with recent functional neuroimaging research showing that the neural signature of autobiographical fact retrieval has commonalities with general semantic memory retrieval (Coronel & Federmeier, 2016; Renoult et al, 2016).…”