Exploring the roles of the executive and short-term feature-binding functions in retrieval of retrograde autobiographical memories in severe traumatic brain injury

Disruption of temporally extended self-memory system following traumatic brain injury

“…Two additionally tasks focused on different binding functions of working memory (WMB): the formation of multimodal representations, and their short-term maintenance. The binding task is a paper and pencil version adapted from Prabhakaran et al (2000) and Quinette et al (2006) (see also Coste et al, 2011;and Piolino et al, 2010 for a detailed presentation in the context of SMS assessment). To carry out one trial correctly, participants had to mentally bind four consonants (verbal features) and four locations (spatial features) in order to form four multimodal (verbal-spatial) representations.…”

“…This task was adapted from the Verbal Autobiographical Fluencies (VAF) task (see Coste et al, 2011;Piolino et al, 2010). The original VAF task was designed to assess the generative hierarchical construction process for remote autobiographical memories, wherein episodic memory retrieval (episodic events and details) is enabled by the retrieval of more semantic knowledge of facts about one's life (lifetime periods and general events).…”

“…According to the literature on AM after TBI (Carlesimo et al, 1998;Coste et al, 2011;Knight and O'Hagan, 2009;Piolino et al, 2007), and the high degree of similarity between recalling the past and imagining the future (Schacter et al, 2008;Suddendorf et al, 2009;Szpunar, 2010), even in TBI (Rasmussen and Berntsen, 2014), we expected deficits in TBI patients for the evocation of both semantic and episodic self-representations regardless of the time period tested (past, recent, future).…”

“…The deficit of episodic AM in TBI has been linked to the disruption of search and construction processes mediated by executive functions . Interestingly, using the SMS framework, Coste et al (2011) revealed that in TBI the deficits of past AM encompassed both impairments of semantic and episodic AM related to executive/working memory deficits (mainly updating and in addition short-term feature binding for episodic details). It was suggested that the TBI patients employed ineffective search strategies, which resulted in disruption of retrieval processes, especially regarding specific events.…”

“…Based on previous results on the role of other cognitive functions in past AM retrieval in TBI (Coste et al, 2011), on the mechanisms of mental time travel in non-amnesic patients (e.g., Duval et al, 2012;Irish and Hodges, 2012), and healthy individuals (Abram et al, 2014;D'Argembeau et al, 2010), we assumed that TBI-related deficits on past and future AM performances would be mainly mediated by executive/working memory abilities, more specifically updating, regardless of the content of AM. In keeping with authors proposing that future thinking is a more demanding process than past remembering (de Vito et al, 2012), and is subserved by f Q4 eature binding (Schacter and Addis, 2007a,b) and semantic memory (Duval et al, 2012; processes, we expected that executive/working memory functions and general semantic skills would be more engaged for future-oriented thinking.…”