Abstract
Co-occurring impairments of episodic-autobiographical memory and theory of mind were described in several psychiatric and neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite sophisticated elaborations in theoretical domains, the relationship between episodic-autobiographical memory and social cognition remains unelucidated. This work’s objectives are establishing greater recognition of the possible contribution of episodic - autobiographical memory to social cognition, by resorting to data from developmental amnesia (a condition with onset in early childhood, caused by relatively selective bilateral damage to hippocampi). We describe a young adult with amnesia with neurodevelopmental mechanisms. The patient was investigated medically, psychiatrically, with extensive neuropsychological methods and with neuroimaging. Neuroimaging revealed grossly reduced hippocampi volumes bilaterally. There was no evidence of pathology in the underlying parahippocampal region or other areas. Performance on tasks that tapped on various aspects of social cognition was non-uniform, ranging from within normal limits to moderate impairment. According to our knowledge, this is among the first case reports about a comprehensive evaluation of social information processing in a patient with amnesia with neurodevelopmental mechanisms. This patient showed impairments in performance in some laboratory tasks for social cognition, but not in others. This suggests that various components of social cognition may have different neural correlates; their unraveling may aid understanding of when and how episodicautobiographical memory contributes to social cognition. This study also emphasizes the need to employ various tasks to assess social cognition in patients with amnesia, which go beyond traditional laboratory paradigms.
Highlights
Memory is divided according to time and content axes, respectively (Markowitsch and Staniloiu, 2012)
Episodic–autobiographical memory contains a wealth of information about people and social interactions; this led several authors to hypothesize that the exchange of EAM might facilitate social cognition, such as understanding of others’ inner world and perspective (Nelson and Fivush, 2004; Spreng et al, 2008) and subsequently might connect and “draw the world together” (Casey, 2000, p. 313)
Interesting data came from a recent study of Rabin and Rosenbaum (2012), which showed that in healthy female participants the functional relation between autobiographical memory and theory of mind (ToM) is modulated by the familiarity of the target person in a ToM task, which in turn affected the employment of cognitive strategies
Summary
Memory is divided according to time and content axes, respectively (Markowitsch and Staniloiu, 2012). Five long-term memory systems were described [procedural, priming, perceptual, semantic, and episodic–autobiographical memory (EAM) systems] (Tulving, 2005) These systems are considered to build up on each other ontogenetically and phylogenetically. EAM is considered the last ontogenetic and phylogenetic achievement (Nelson, 2003, 2005; Nelson and Fivush, 2004; Tulving, 2005) It is currently defined as being the conjunction of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness, and the experiencing self (Tulving, 2005). While the latter definition of autonoetic consciousness might suggest a link between EAM and the dialectic of self and others (Suddendorf et al, 2009), the relationship between EAM (Tulving, 2005; Markowitsch and Staniloiu, 2012) and social cognition [theory of mind (ToM), empathy, simulation, social judgment, moral judgment] (Adolphs, 2010a) remains debated, and insufficiently explored experimentally
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