The autobiographical memory interview: A new assessment of autobiographical and personal semantic memory in amnesic patients

Abstract

This paper describes a new technique for assessing "autobiographical" and "personal semantic" memory in amnesic patients and healthy controls. It provides evidence of the reliability and validity of the procedure, and reports an age-related temporal gradient in amnesic patients. The results are considered in terms of the severity, the rate of onset, and the duration of the amnesia; and a preliminary analysis is given of the findings in different diagnostic groups. The findings indicate that autobiographical and personal semantic memory show a consistent pattern of impairment, when a comparison is made which controls for the age of the memories and the subject's own past experience.

Retrograde amnesia for semantic information in Alzheimer's disease

“…Here, no gradient could be established within the NVT, though one was found in episodic retrograde amnesia. The inconsistent findings are in line with the literature, as gradients are sometimes found in patients with Alzheimer's disease (Beatty & Salmon, 1991;Beatty et al, 1988;Brown, 2002;Kopelman et al, 1989;Moscovitch, 1982), and sometimes not (Leplow et al, 1997;Thompson et al, 2002;Wilson et al, 1981). It should be noted that the periods tested in the NVT all fall between the 'recent' period on the AMI and the other two periods.…”

“…This law results in a temporal gradient, referred to as the Ribot gradient, in which patients show great deficits on test items measuring memory for recent memories, and smaller ones on items measuring remote memories. Such a Ribot gradient has also been found in patients with Alzheimer's disease, although it tends to be shallower than that in other groups and is not found consistently (Beatty et al, 1988;Brown, 2002;Deweer et al, 2001;Kopelman et al, 1989).…”

“…As a test of episodic retrograde amnesia, the Dutch adaptation of the Autobiographical Memory Interview (AMI, Kopelman et al, 1989Kopelman et al, , 1990Meeter & Murre, 2003) was partially administered. This test consists of "personal semantic" questions (precise questions about factual information), and nine "incident" questions, in which respondents must generate an anecdote from different periods in their life of the respondent.…”

“…Moreover, all remote memory tests contain semantic items, at least following some definitions of semantic memory. If semantic memory is "the component of long term memory which represents our knowledge of objects, facts and concepts, as well as words and their meanings" (Garrard et al, 1997), then all tests of public knowledge are tests of semantic memory (as they query facts about the news), and many tests of autobiographical memory contain semantic items (the so-called "personalsemantic" questions, Kazui et al, 2003;Kopelman et al, 1989). Nevertheless, some semantic memories are more semantic than others.…”

“…In addition, patients with Alzheimer's disease typically develop retrograde amnesia as indexed by a loss of autobiographical memories (Kopelman et al, 1989), a loss of dated public knowledge (Beatty et al, 1988;Kopelman et al, 1989;Leplow et al, 1997), and an inability to recognize famous faces (Thompson et al, 2002). In many patient groups with amnesia and in experimental animals, retrograde amnesia conforms to Ribot's law, stating that recent memories are more vulnerable to brain damage than remote memories (Kim & Fanselow, 1992;Ribot, 1881;Squire, 1992).…”