The immediacy of recollection: The use of the historical present in narratives of autobiographical episodes by patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy

Abstract

Objectively measuring the experiential phenomenon of “reliving” a personal memory without relying on the retrieval of specific contents such as richness/vividness of perceptual details is difficult. There are, however, some circumstances in which an indirect measure that does not require conscious retrieval or deliberate assessment of such information, would be quite useful (e.g., in very young children, in patients with poor fluency or inappropriate use of rating scales). Here, we examined the use of the historical present (HP), defined as a present tense that refers to a past action, in autobiographical narratives. The HP indexes a sense of reliving because the memory of the event is vividly re-experienced as occurring again in the current moment. We compared the use of the HP in narratives from neurologically intact controls and from patients with unilateral temporal lobe excisions or epilepsy (TLE). Results indicate that patients used fewer instances of the HP than healthy controls. Also, the use of the HP correlated positively with other measures of recollection, such as the total number of perceptual details contained in a narrative. We provide the first empirical evidence that a linguistic construct can be used to assess the conscious experience that accompanies recollection.