Amnesia as an impairment of detail generation and binding: Evidence from personal, fictional, and semantic narratives in K.C.
Section snippets
Participants
K.C. was 52 years old at the time of testing. He is right-handed with 15 years of formal education and suffered irreversible amnesia as a consequence of a traumatic brain injury from a motorcycle accident in 1981. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) performed in 1996 revealed a pattern of diffuse brain damage that includes almost complete loss of hippocampal tissue and clear signs of atrophy to the parahippocampus in both hemispheres (see Rosenbaum et al., 2005). Also of note is a large lesion in
Discussion
This study addressed whether extensive remote memory loss specific to autobiographical information in amnesia is due to an inability to represent episodic details in long-term AM or to a more general construction deficit that does not permit generation or binding of details, independent of AM. K.C. had the most difficulty in reconstructing memories of events he experienced in the past, but he also was impaired in constructing from imagination detailed events that were never personally
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant to R.S.R. (grant no. 312639), FP6 Marie-Curie IRG grant (EU) to A.G., Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) grant to M.M. and G.W. (grant no. MGP-6694), and National Institutes of Mental Health grant to B.L. (grant no. RO1 MIH0076067-02). R.S.R. is supported by a CIHR New Investigator Award. We wish to thank Namita Kumar, Allison Mackey, and Alina Nikiforov for technical assistance, and Raymond Mar and
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