Neurocognitive Perspective of Transient Global Amnesia

Abstract

Transient global amnesia (TGA) is a neuropsychological syndrome that involves a sudden and temporary episode of memory loss that includes inability to create new memories. It has been shown that this disorder is related with a transitory deficit of the hippocampus function. In this chapter, the preserved and impaired memory pattern of TGA patients will be discussed considering the classical memory systems model. The analysis of this perspective leads to some contradictory or unresolved issues. In order to try to resolve these inconsistencies and considering that TGA is associated with hippocampal perturbation, new research about the hippocampus is analyzed. This new perspective focused on the hippocampal function provides a deeper understanding of the memory loss pattern associated with TGA, and it points out new questions that are not studied yet in the TGA population.

Neurological and Mental Disorders

“…The association between social anxiety and EDs could be a part of a wider socio-emotional phenotype which it is considered to contribute to the development and maintenance of EDs. SA may be a risk factor for ED, or SA may be secondary to the ED, as a consequence of ED psychopathology or malnutrition [81].…”

“…SimSensei Kiosk was a virtual human interviewer which aims to automatically assess the verbal and nonverbal behaviors indicative of depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD). A multimodal real-time sensing system was used to simultaneously capture different modalities (e.g., smile intensity, 3D head position and orientation, intensity or lack of facial expressions like anger, disgust, and joy) to model the relation between mental states and human behavior [81].…”

“…Based on previous research, TGA patients have preserved capacity to maintain activated a limited amount of information for a brief period of time. This has been addressed using digit span task [13,71,[78][79][80], immediate memory for rhythms [81,82], memory for spatial positions measured with the Corsi block-tapping task [45,70,71,78,80], and immediate recall for letters and objects [81]. Regarding working memory during TGA, there are no conclusive results, probably due to the diversity of required processes and the variability of complexity level through different tasks.…”

“…Different laboratory tests have been used to measure episodic memory. Free recall, the ability to reproduce previously presented material, is severely impaired, using visually presented words [40,66,67,70,78], auditory-presented words [27,64,85], semantically unrelated word pairs [72,86], prose passages [40,62,72,81,86], or complex geometric figures [40,64,78,85,86].…”

“…Regarding cue-recall, the ability to retrieve information with a recovery cue that guides searching processes, there are no conclusive data. Some patients obtain preserved cue-recall scores, and other patients show significantly lower performance than the control group [27,69,70,81]. And it seems that is not related with the type of cueing methods but with the patient, since contradictory outputs have been found using the same method.…”