Spontaneous confabulations, disorientation, and the processing of ‘now’

Abstract

We have previously demonstrated that spontaneous confabulations and disorientation in amnesia emanate from temporal context confusion in memory characterised by intrusion of previously acquired information into ongoing thinking. This failure appears to be due to an inability to suppress previously activated memory traces of events dating back hours, weeks or even years. In the present study, the possibility was explored that spontaneous confabulators also have a problem in processing information in the very short-term range of the psychological present (the ‘now’), which has been defined as the duration of an experiential process. Tasks assessing the processing of time within the psychological present were devised to test this possibility. In experiment 1, spontaneous confabulators, in comparison with other amnestic patients, failed to discriminate brief, visually presented intervals in the now. In experiment 2, they failed to make motion-associated time estimations within the now. These deficits also correlated with disorientation. Although these results do not prove a causal relationship, they indicate that spontaneously confabulating and disorientated patients typically do fail to process information within the ‘now’.