Factor structure of overall autobiographical memory usage: The directive, self and social functions revisited

Brain Imaging and Behavior

Noblet

Denkova

et al. 2015

Mental time travel (MTT) entails the ability to mentally travel into autobiographical memory (AM) and episodic future thinking (EFT). While AM and EFT share common phenomenological and cerebral functional properties, distinctive characteristics have been documented in healthy and clinical populations. No report, to our knowledge, has informed on the functional underpinnings of MTT impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, hence the aim of this work. We studied 22 relapsing-remitting MS patients and 22 matched controls. Participants underwent an AM/EFT assessment using the Autobiographical Interview (Levine et al. 2002), followed by a functional MRI session. The latter consisted in AM and EFT tasks, distinguishing the construction and elaboration phases of events. The results showed impaired performance for AM and EFT in patients, accompanied by increased cerebral activations mostly located in the frontal regions, which extended to the parietal, lateral temporal and posterior regions during AM/EFT tasks, relative to healthy controls. Enhanced brain activations in MS patients were particularly evident during the EFT task and involved the hippocampus, frontal, external temporal, and cingulate regions. The construction phase required greater fronto-parieto-temporal activations in MS patients relative to both healthy controls, and the elaboration phase. Taking together, our results suggested the occurrence of cerebral activation changes in the context of MTT in MS patients, expressed by distinct and common mechanisms for AM and EFT. This study may provide new insights in terms of cerebral activation changes in brain lesion and their application to clinical settings, considering AM/EFT's central role in everyday life.

Section: Fig 4 Significant Brain Activations For the Group X Task Insupporting

confidence: 71%

Distinct and common cerebral activation changes during mental time travel in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients

Brain Imaging and Behavior

Noblet

Denkova

et al. 2015

“…Bearing in mind the essential role of AM and EFT in everyday life [16,40,55], the present findings suggest some clinical issues. In the first place, besides our MS patients' occasional complaints, the semi-structured interview showed that they were well (and accurately) aware of their difficulties and able to verbally articulate them to convey a clear message.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Indeed, AM contributes to the construction and the continuity of the personal identity, plays at least two social roles, the development of new relationships and the nurturing of existing ones, and involves also a directive function, where the past serves as a basis for guiding present and future behaviours [9,40], With regard to EFT, three main functional benefits have also been described [55] comprising a role in (i) coping skills for stressful events, with an implication in emotion regulation and problem solving; (ii) goal achievement, for which the act of imagining various scenarios helps to reach the desired goal; and finally, (iii) the implementation of intentions, for which a higher likelihood of completing an action is observed when there is an intention to implement this action. Furthermore, D'Argembeau, Lardi & Van der Linden [17] suggested that EFT, similarly to AM and, particularly, self-defining EFTs contribute to a person's sense of self and, together with self defining AMs, give rise to a strong sense of personal continuity over time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired mental simulation of specific past and future personal events in non-depressed multiple sclerosis patients

Journal of the Neurological Sciences

Blanc

Seze

et al. 2014

The aims of the present study were (i) to explore autobiographical memory and episodic future thought in multiple sclerosis (MS), using Levine's Autobiographical Interview; (ii) to investigate the influence of the Interview's high retrieval support condition (the specific probe phase) on MS patients' past and future simulations and (iii) to obtain the patients' estimations of their own difficulties, during the test, and in everyday life. To that end, we examined 39 non-depressed relapsing-remitting MS patients and 34 healthy subjects matched for gender, age and education level. The 73 participants underwent an adapted version of the Autobiographical Interview in two conditions: remembering and imagining personal events. The group of patients also underwent an extended neuropsychological baseline, including particularly, anterograde memory and executive functions. The results showed that the MS patients' scores on the baseline were mildly or not impaired. On the contrary, the Autobiographical Interview measure, i.e., the mean number of internal details, for each of the two phases of the test -free recall and specific probe -was significantly lower in simulated past and future events in comparison with the healthy controls. Within each group, autobiographical memory performance was superior to episodic future thought performance. A strong positive correlation was observed between past and future mental simulation scores in both groups.In conclusion, our results showed, for the first time, the co-occurrence of deficit of remembering the past and imagining the future in MS patients. They also showed more difficulty in imagining future events than remembering past events for both patients and normal controls. MS being a neurological condition very frequent in the young adult population, the clinical considerations of our study might be of interest. Indeed, they give rise to new insights on MS patients' daily life difficulties related to impaired mental simulation of personal events despite general abilities, including anterograde memory, only mildly or not impaired.

“…Bearing in mind that AM plays a major role in daily life functioning and is ultimately linked to the self (Rasmussen & Habermas, 2011), its impairment can lead to debilitating consequences, which emphasises the clinical necessity of this kind of investigations. To that end, we studied (1) the functional cerebral substrates sustaining both the access and further recollection of details associated with personal memories and (2) the influence of recollective qualities of memories on cerebral activations in MS patients.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional cerebral changes in multiple sclerosis patients during an autobiographical memory test

Noblet

Denkova

et al. 2014

Memory

Our aim was to investigate the functional underpinnings of autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. To that end, 18 patients and 18 controls underwent the autobiographical interview (AI). Subsequently, the 36 participants underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session designed to assess the construction and elaboration of AMs. A categorical control task was also presented. Patients were trained in the fMRI procedure to optimise the procedural aspects accompanying the task itself. Although the patients obtained significantly poorer AI scores (p < .001), their performance on the easier AM fMRI task was efficiently carried out, allowing relevant comparisons with healthy controls. Relatively to healthy controls, the patients showed increased and bilateral cerebral activations (p < .005) during the construction and elaboration phases. The prefrontal, temporal and posterior cerebral region activations were located within the core network sustaining AM, with the bilateral prefrontal region being centrally involved. The parametric neural responses to the difficulty of access and amount of details of memories were also significantly different for the two groups, with the right hippocampal region showing a particularly increased recruitment (p < .005). The findings suggested the presence of functional cerebral changes during AM performance and supported the presence of AM retrieval deficit in MS patients.