Preserved Knowledge of Self in a Case of Alzheimer's Dementia

Abstract

We report the case of K. R., an individual with Alzheimer's dementia. Although K. R. has difficulty retrieving even mundane facts about the world, she has accurate knowledge of her own personality. But the self she knows is out-of-date. K. R.'s inability to update her trait self-knowledge stands in contrast to other neuropsychological cases in which individuals can acquire and update their fund of personality knowledge despite impairments to semantic and episodic memory. Results add to the growing body of literature suggesting that semantic memory contains a subsystem devoted to the acquisition and representation of trait self-knowledge.