Mechanisms of remembering the past and imagining the future – New data from autobiographical memory tasks in a lifespan approach

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

“…In healthy controls, working memory/executive functions predicted the evocation of episodic events from the past or the future, in keeping with previous research (D'Argembeau et al, 2010;Abram et al, 2014). In contrast, personal semantic knowledge was predicted by the degree of certitude of self-concepts regardless of the time direction.…”

“…Thus, in line with these new findings, the literature has extended the study of episodic mental time travel to the role of semantic memory (for reviews: Klein, 2013; and executive and working memory functions (Abram et al, 2014;D'Argembeau et al, 2010;Cole et al, 2013), but not yet in TBI patients. Questioning the nature of the autobiographical representations and processes involved in mental time travel can be suitably explored in reference to the structuro-functional model of the self-memory system (SMS) proposed by Conway (Conway, 2005(Conway, , 2009Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).…”

“…The fixed order was chosen based on our previous AM studies in patients (e.g., frontotemporal dementia, TBI, Alzheimer's disease) and elderly exploring the past from the most remote time period to the most recent one, i.e., from the most easily retrievable to the most difficult to access. Here, we chose to test the future period at the end, considering this period as the most difficult compared to the remote and recent past (Abram et al, 2014;de Vito et al, 2012). The global design of evaluation for the SMS in extended time is summarized in Fig.…”

“…This evaluation was derived from the Twenty Statements Test or "I am" test (Kuhn and McPartland, 1954) and previous adaptations of the test to the study of conceptual self in the past and the future (e.g., 3 I test, Duval et al, 2012;Abram et al, 2014). In its original form, it required participants to make twenty statements, each beginning with "I am", in answer to the question "Who am I?"…”

“…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.…”