Abstract

This study aims to investigate autonoetic consciousness associated with episodic autobiographical memory in patients who had undergone unilateral medial temporal lobe resection for intractable epilepsy. Autonoetic consciousness, defined as the conscious feeling of mentally travelling back in time to relive a specific event, was assessed using the Remember/Know (R/K) paradigm across different time periods as proposed in the autobiographical memory task developed by Piolino et al. (TEMPau task). Results revealed that the two patient groups (left and right temporal resection) gave reduced sense of reliving (R) responses and more familiarity (K) responses than healthy controls. This poor autonoetic consciousness was highlighted when patients were asked to justify their Remember responses by recalling sensory-perceptive, affective or spatiotemporal specific details across all life periods. These results support the bilateral MTL contribution to episodic autobiographical memory covering the entire lifespan, which is consistent with the multiple trace theory of MTL function [7,9]. This study also demonstrates the bilateral involvement of MTL structures in recalling specific details of personal events characterized by autonoetic consciousness.

Highlights

  • Since the famous case H.M. [18], it is well known that medial temporal lobe structures (MTL) are involved in episodic memory, which supports the encod-ing, storage and retrieval of life’s events set in a specific spatio-temporal context

  • The aim of this study was to examine autobiographical memory in patients following unilateral MTL resection in order to examine the autonoetic consciousness of personal events

  • Both LTR and RTR patient groups showed an impairment of episodic autobiographical memory but preservation of personal semantic memory which is in agreement with the existing literature [1,5,23,24]

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Summary

Introduction

Since the famous case H.M. [18], it is well known that medial temporal lobe structures (MTL) are involved in episodic memory, which supports the encod-ing, storage and retrieval of life’s events set in a specific spatio-temporal context. Most of the studies on temporal lobe epileptic patients as well as on patients who had undergone temporal lobe resection to treat pharmaco-resistant epilepsy are focused on anterograde memory impairments, recent studies have addressed autobiographical memory retrieval They demonstrated spared personal semantic memory but generally showed deficits of episodic. Previous studies did not examine autonoetic consciousness which gives a subject the conscious feeling of travelling backwards in time to relive the original event ([20] and for review see [21]). This particular state of consciousness during retrieval of information can be assessed with the Remember/Know (R/K) paradigm [3,22]. ‘Remembering’ is associated with autonoetic consciousness whereas ‘knowing’ is associated with noetic consciousness, which characterizes semantic memory

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