scholarly journals Autobiographical memory unknown: Pervasive autobiographical memory loss encompassing personality trait knowledge in an individual with medial temporal lobe amnesia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrey Anne Ladd Wank ◽  
Anna Robertson ◽  
Sean C. Thayer ◽  
Mieke Verfaellie ◽  
Steven Z. Rapcsak ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Medial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobes ◽  
Temporal Lobes

Autobiographical memory consists of distinct memory types varying from highly abstract to episodic. Self trait knowledge, which is considered one of the more abstract types of autobiographical memory, is thought to rely on regions of the autobiographical memory neural network implicated in schema representation, including the medial prefrontal cortex, and critically, not the medial temporal lobes. The current case study introduces an individual who, as a consequence of bilateral posterior cerebral artery strokes, experienced extensive medial temporal lobe damage with sparing of the medial prefrontal cortex. Interestingly, in addition to severe retrograde and anterograde episodic and autobiographical fact amnesia, this individual’s self trait knowledge was impaired for his current and pre-morbid personality traits. Yet, further assessment revealed that this individual had preserved conceptual knowledge for personality traits, could reliably and accurately rate another person’s traits, and could access his own self-concept in a variety of ways. In addition to autobiographical memory loss, he demonstrated impairment on non-personal semantic memory tests, most notably on tests requiring retrieval of unique knowledge. This rare case of amnesia suggests a previously unreported role for the medial temporal lobes in personal trait knowledge, which we propose reflects the critical role of this neural region in the storage and retrieval of personal semantics that are experience-near, meaning autobiographical facts grounded in spatiotemporal contexts.

scholarly journals Autobiographical Memory and Patterns of Brain Atrophy in Fronto-temporal Lobar Degeneration

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 1839-1853 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret C. McKinnon ◽  
Elena I. Nica ◽  
Pheth Sengdy ◽  
Natasa Kovacevic ◽  
Morris Moscovitch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Behavioral Pattern ◽  
Remote Memory ◽  
Semantic Retrieval ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Matched Comparison

Autobiographical memory paradigms have been increasingly used to study the behavioral and neuroanatomical correlates of human remote memory. Although there are numerous functional neuroimaging studies on this topic, relatively few studies of patient samples exist, with heterogeneity of results owing to methodological variability. In this study, fronto-temporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), a form of dementia affecting regions crucial to autobiographical memory, was used as a model of autobiographical memory loss. We emphasized the separation of episodic (recollection of specific event, perceptual, and mental state information) from semantic (factual information unspecific in time and place) autobiographical memory, derived from a reliable method for scoring transcribed autobiographical protocols, the Autobiographical Interview [Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval. Psychology and Aging, 17, 677–689, 2002]. Patients with the fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) and mixed fronto-temporal and semantic dementia (FTD/SD) variants of FTLD were impaired at reconstructing episodically rich autobiographical memories across the lifespan, with FTD/SD patients generating an excess of generic semantic autobiographical information. Patients with progressive nonfluent aphasia were mildly impaired for episodic autobiographical memory, but this impairment was eliminated with the provision of structured cueing, likely reflecting relatively intact medial-temporal lobe function, whereas the same cueing failed to bolster the FTD and FTD/SD patients' performance relative to that of matched comparison subjects. The pattern of episodic, but not semantic, autobiographical impairment was enhanced with disease progression on 1- to 2-year follow-up testing in a subset of patients, supplementing the cross-sectional evidence for specificity of episodic autobiographical impairment with longitudinal data. This behavioral pattern covaried with volume loss in a distributed left-lateralized posterior network centered on the temporal lobe, consistent with evidence from other patient and functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory. Frontal lobe volumes, however, did not significantly contribute to this network, suggesting that frontal contributions to autobiographical episodic memory may be more complex than previously appreciated.

scholarly journals Biochemical abnormalities of the medial temporal lobe and medial prefrontal cortex in late-life depression

2009 ◽  
Vol 172 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talaignair N. Venkatraman ◽  
Ranga R. Krishnan ◽  
David C. Steffens ◽  
Allen W. Song ◽  
Warren D. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Medial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Late Life ◽  
Late Life Depression ◽  
Biochemical Abnormalities

scholarly journals Neural Pattern Change During Encoding of a Narrative Predicts Retrospective Duration Estimates

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Lositsky ◽  
Janice Chen ◽  
Daniel Toker ◽  
Christopher J Honey ◽  
Jordan L Poppenk ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Entorhinal Cortex ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobes ◽  
Anterior Temporal Lobe ◽  
Temporal Lobes ◽  
Contextual Features ◽  
Pattern Change ◽  
Behavioral Studies ◽  
The Right

What mechanisms support our ability to estimate durations on the order of minutes? Behavioral studies in humans have shown that changes in contextual features lead to overestimation of past durations. Based on evidence that the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex represent contextual features, we related the degree of fMRI pattern change in these regions with people's subsequent duration estimates. After listening to a radio story in the scanner, participants were asked how much time had elapsed between pairs of clips from the story. Our ROI analysis found that the neural pattern distance between two clips at encoding was correlated with duration estimates in the right entorhinal cortex and right pars orbitalis. Moreover, a whole-brain searchlight analysis revealed a cluster spanning the right anterior temporal lobe. Our findings provide convergent support for the hypothesis that retrospective time judgments are driven by 'drift' in contextual representations supported by these regions.

scholarly journals Autobiographical memory unknown: Pervasive autobiographical memory loss encompassing personality trait knowledge in an individual with medial temporal lobe amnesia

Cortex ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrey A. Wank ◽  
Anna Robertson ◽  
Sean C. Thayer ◽  
Mieke Verfaellie ◽  
Steven Z. Rapcsak ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Personality Trait ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Memory Loss

Does the Medial Temporal Lobe Bind Phonological Memories?

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 593-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Knott ◽  
William Marslen-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Phonological Memory ◽  
Distinctive Pattern ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobes ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Temporal Lobes ◽  
Phonological Errors

The medial temporal lobes play a central role in the consolidation of new memories. Medial temporal lesions impair episodic learning in amnesia, and disrupt vocabulary acquisition. To investigate the role of consolidation processes in phonological memory and to understand where and how, in amnesia, these processes begin to fail, we reexamined phonological memory in the amnesic patient HM. While HM's word span performance was normal, his supraspan recall was shown to be markedly impaired, with his recall characterized by a distinctive pattern of phonological errors, where he recombined phonemes from the original list to form new response words. These were similar to errors observed earlier for patients with specifically semantic deficits. Amnesic Korsakoff's patients showed a similar, though much less marked, pattern. We interpret the data in terms of a model of lexical representation where temporal lobe damage disrupts the processes that normally bind semantic and phonological representations.

scholarly journals Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimates

eLife ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Lositsky ◽  
Janice Chen ◽  
Daniel Toker ◽  
Christopher J Honey ◽  
Michael Shvartsman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Entorhinal Cortex ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobes ◽  
Anterior Temporal Lobe ◽  
Temporal Lobes ◽  
Contextual Features ◽  
Pattern Change ◽  
Behavioral Studies ◽  
The Right

What mechanisms support our ability to estimate durations on the order of minutes? Behavioral studies in humans have shown that changes in contextual features lead to overestimation of past durations. Based on evidence that the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex represent contextual features, we related the degree of fMRI pattern change in these regions with people’s subsequent duration estimates. After listening to a radio story in the scanner, participants were asked how much time had elapsed between pairs of clips from the story. Our ROI analyses found that duration estimates were correlated with the neural pattern distance between two clips at encoding in the right entorhinal cortex. Moreover, whole-brain searchlight analyses revealed a cluster spanning the right anterior temporal lobe. Our findings provide convergent support for the hypothesis that retrospective time judgments are driven by 'drift' in contextual representations supported by these regions.

The von Restorff Effect in Amnesia: The Contribution of the Hippocampal System to Novelty-Related Memory Enhancements

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. M. Kishiyama ◽  
A. P. Yonelinas ◽  
M. M. Lazzara
Keyword(s):  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Hippocampal Damage ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobes ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Temporal Lobes ◽  
Control Subjects ◽  
Healthy Control ◽  
Thalamic Lesions ◽  
Better Than

The ability to detect novelty is a characteristic of all mammalian nervous systems (Sokolov, 1963), and it plays a critical role in memory in the sense that items that are novel, or distinctive, are remembered better than those that are less distinct (von Restorff, 1933). Although several brain areas are sensitive to stimulus novelty, it is not yet known which regions play a role in producing novelty-related effects on memory. In the current study, we investigated novelty effects on recognition memory in amnesic patients and healthy control subjects. The control subjects demonstrated better recognition for items that were novel (i.e., presented in an infrequent color), and this effect was found for both recollection and familiarity-based responses. However, the novelty advantage was effectively eliminated in patients with extensive medial temporal lobe damage, mild hypoxic patients expected to have relatively selective hippocampal damage, and in a patient with thalamic lesions. The results indicate that the human medial temporal lobes play a critical role in producing normal novelty effects in memory.

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