The life stories of adults with amnesia: Insights into the contribution of the medial temporal lobes to the organization of autobiographical memory

Grilli, Matthew D.; Wank, Aubrey A.; Verfaellie, Mieke

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.03.013

Cited by 26 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Also, given that our EAM assessment can be assumed to place relatively high demands on narrative ability and working memory, consistent with prior work (Grilli & Verfaellie, 2015; Grilli et al, 2018), we administered the subtests that contribute to the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV; Weschsler, 2008) Verbal Comprehension Index and the Working Memory Index.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Evidence for Reduced Autobiographical Memory Episodic Specificity in Cognitively Normal Middle-Aged and Older Individuals at Increased Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia

Grilli

Wank

Bercel

et al. 2018

J Int Neuropsychol Soc

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective Alzheimer’s disease (AD) typically eludes clinical detection for years, if not decades. The identification of subtle cognitive decline associated with preclinical AD would not only advance understanding of the disease, but also provide clinical targets to assess preventative and early intervention treatments. Disrupted retrieval of detailed episodic autobiographical memories may be a sensitive indicator of subtle cognitive decline, because this type of memory taxes a core neural network affected by preclinical AD neuropathology. Method To begin to address this idea, we assessed the episodic specificity of autobiographical memories retrieved by cognitively normal middle-aged and older individuals who are carriers of the apolipoprotein E ε4 allele – a population at increased risk for subtle cognitive decline related to neuropathological risk factors for AD. We compared the ε4 carriers to non-carriers of ε4 similar in age, education, and gender. Results The ε4 carriers did not perform worse than the non-carriers on a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests. In contrast, as a group, the ε4 carriers generated autobiographical memories that were reduced in “internal” or episodic details relative to non-carriers. Conclusions These findings support the notion that reduced autobiographical episodic detail generation may be a marker of subtle cognitive decline associated with AD.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Evidence for Reduced Autobiographical Memory Episodic Specificity in Cognitively Normal Middle-Aged and Older Individuals at Increased Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia

Grilli

Wank

Bercel

et al. 2018

J Int Neuropsychol Soc

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There may also be age-of-onset effects in amnesia (Grilli, Wank, & Verfaellie, 2018). Kopelman, Wilson, and Baddeley (1989) found that older, but not younger, patients showed a steep gradient, arguing that: "Older subjects (but not the younger) encode or consolidate new [recent] memories in a way that somehow makes them more vulnerable to the effects of brain damage than our earlier memories."…”

Section: The Temporal Gradient: a Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Anomalies of Autobiographical Memory

Kopelman

2019

J Int Neuropsychol Soc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objectives:In this paper, I review three ‘anomalies’ or disorders in autobiographical memory: neurological retrograde amnesia (RA), spontaneous confabulation, and psychogenic amnesia.Methods:Existing theories are reviewed, their limitations considered, some of my own empirical findings briefly described, and possible interpretations proposed and interspersed with illustrative case-reports.Results:In RA, there may be an important retrieval component to the deficit, and factors at encoding may give rise to the relative preservation of early memories (and the reminiscence bump) which manifests as a temporal gradient. Spontaneous confabulation appears to be associated with a damaged ‘filter’ in orbitofrontal and ventromedial frontal regions. Consistent with this, an empirical study has shown that both the initial severity of confabulation and its subsequent decline are associated with changes in the executive function (especially in cognitive estimate errors) and inversely with the quantity of accurate autobiographical memories retrieved. Psychogenic amnesia can be ‘global’ or ‘situation-specific’. The former is associated with a precipitating stress, depressed mood, and (often) a past history of a transient neurological amnesia. In these circumstances, frontal control mechanisms can inhibit retrieval of autobiographical memories, and even the sense of ‘self’ (identity), while compromised medial temporal function prevents subsequent retrieval of what occurred during a ‘fugue’. An empirical investigation of psychogenic amnesia and some recent imaging studies have provided findings consistent with this view.Conclusions:Taken together, these various observations point to the importance of frontal ‘control’ systems (in interaction with medial temporal/hippocampal systems) in the retrieval and, more particularly, the disrupted retrieval of ‘old’ memories.

show abstract

“…It is likely that the relationships between autobiographical periods and specific episodes are characterized by many associations so that a given memory could be part of multiple autobiographic periods which themselves could be contained in multiple "Life Chapters" [168,179]. Life chapters are major components in this hierarchical autobiographical knowledge structure that reflect extended time periods, typically spanning months to years, such as an individual's childhood or career [168,179,180]. As with nested hierarchies, one could predict that the AHC would have a functional role in the recollection of broader-scaled life chapters and the PHC would be more involved in recalling finer-grained episodes.…”

Section: Multi-scale Models Of Declarative Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Role for the Longitudinal Axis of the Hippocampus in Multiscale Representations of Large and Complex Spatial Environments and Mnemonic Hierarchies

Harland¹,

Contreras²,

Fellous³

2018

The Hippocampus - Plasticity and Functions

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The hippocampus is involved in spatial navigation and memory in rodents and humans. Anatomically, the hippocampus extends along a longitudinal axis that shows a combination of graded and specific interconnections with neocortical and subcortical brain areas. Functionally, place cells are found all along the longitudinal axis and exhibit gradients of properties including an increasing dorsal-to-ventral place field size. We propose a view of hippocampal function in which fine-dorsal to coarse-ventral overlapping representations collaborate to form a multi-level representation of spatial and episodic memory that is dominant during navigation in large and complex environments or when encoding complex memories. This view is supported by the fact that the effects of ventral hippocampal damage are generally only found in larger laboratoryscale environments, and by the finding that human virtual navigation studies associate ventral hippocampal involvement with increased environmental complexity. Other mechanisms such as the ability of place cells to exhibit multiple fields and their ability to scale their fields with changes in environment size may be utilized when forming large-scale cognitive maps. Coarse-grained ventral representations may overlap with and provide multi-modal global contexts to finer-grained intermediate and dorsal representations, a mechanism that may support mnemonic hierarchies of autobiographical memory in humans.

show abstract

The life stories of adults with amnesia: Insights into the contribution of the medial temporal lobes to the organization of autobiographical memory

Cited by 26 publications

References 34 publications

Evidence for Reduced Autobiographical Memory Episodic Specificity in Cognitively Normal Middle-Aged and Older Individuals at Increased Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia

Evidence for Reduced Autobiographical Memory Episodic Specificity in Cognitively Normal Middle-Aged and Older Individuals at Increased Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia

Anomalies of Autobiographical Memory

A Role for the Longitudinal Axis of the Hippocampus in Multiscale Representations of Large and Complex Spatial Environments and Mnemonic Hierarchies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About