Confabulations on Time: Relationship between Confabulations and Timing Deviations in Alzheimer's Disease.

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between confabulations and the ability to process chronological characteristics of memories in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). We evaluated provoked confabulations, spontaneous confabulations, and time perception in 31AD patients. We evaluated provoked confabulations with questions probing general and personal knowledge. We evaluated spontaneous confabulations with a scale rated by nursing and medical staff. Regarding time perception, we invited the participants to perform a simple ongoing activity (i.e., deciding whether words were abstract or concrete), in order to provide a verbal estimation of the elapsed time intervals. We observed significant positive correlations between provoked/spontaneous confabulations and deviations in time estimation on the time perception task. These findings demonstrate a relationship between confabulations in AD and difficulties in processing the chronological characteristics of elapsed events.