Autobiographical Facts Research Articles

Experience-near but not experience-far autobiographical facts depend on the medial temporal lobe for retrieval: Evidence from amnesia

This paper addresses the idea that there may be two types of autobiographical facts with distinct cognitive and neural mechanisms: “Experience-near” autobiographical facts, which contain spatiotemporal content derived from personal experience and thus depend on the medial temporal lobe (MTL) for retrieval, and “experience-far” autobiographical facts, which are abstract memories and thus rely on neocortical brain regions involved in retrieval of general semantic memory. To investigate this conceptual model of autobiographical fact knowledge, we analyzed the nature of autobiographical facts that were generated by 8 individuals with MTL amnesia and 12 control participants in a recent study of identity and memory [Grilli, M.D., & Verfaellie, M. (2015). Supporting the self-concept with memory: insight from amnesia. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 1684–1692]. Results revealed that MTL amnesic participants generated fewer experience-near autobiographical facts than controls. Experience-far autobiographical fact generation was not impaired in amnesic participants with damage restricted to the MTL, but there was preliminary evidence to suggest that it may be impaired in amnesic participants with damage to the MTL and anterior lateral temporal lobe. These results support a cognitive and neural distinction between experience-near and experience-far autobiographical facts and have implications for understanding the contribution of autobiographical fact knowledge to self-related cognition.

Personal semantics: Is it distinct from episodic and semantic memory? An electrophysiological study of memory for autobiographical facts and repeated events in honor of Shlomo Bentin

Declarative memory is thought to consist of two independent systems: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory represents personal and contextually unique events, while semantic memory represents culturally-shared, acontextual factual knowledge. Personal semantics refers to aspects of declarative memory that appear to fall somewhere in between the extremes of episodic and semantic. Examples include autobiographical knowledge and memories of repeated personal events. These two aspects of personal semantics have been studied little and rarely compared to both semantic and episodic memory. We recorded the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 27 healthy participants while they verified the veracity of sentences probing four types of questions: general (i.e., semantic) facts, autobiographical facts, repeated events, and unique (i.e., episodic) events. Behavioral results showed equivalent reaction times in all 4 conditions. True sentences were verified faster than false sentences, except for unique events for which no significant difference was observed. Electrophysiological results showed that the N400 (which is classically associated with retrieval from semantic memory) was maximal for general facts and the LPC (which is classically associated with retrieval from episodic memory) was maximal for unique events. For both ERP components, the two personal semantic conditions (i.e., autobiographical facts and repeated events) systematically differed from semantic memory. In addition, N400 amplitudes also differentiated autobiographical facts from unique events. Autobiographical facts and repeated events did not differ significantly from each other but their corresponding scalp distributions differed from those associated with general facts. Our results suggest that the neural correlates of personal semantics can be distinguished from those of semantic and episodic memory, and may provide clues as to how unique events are transformed to semantic memory.

Supporting the self-concept with memory: insight from amnesia.

We investigated the extent to which personal semantic memory supports the self-concept in individuals with medial temporal lobe amnesia and healthy adults. Participants completed eight 'I Am' self-statements. For each of the four highest ranked self-statements, participants completed an open-ended narrative task, during which they provided supporting information indicating why the I Am statement was considered self-descriptive. Participants then completed an episodic probe task, during which they attempted to retrieve six episodic memories for each of these self-statements. Supporting information was scored as episodic, personal semantic or general semantic. In the narrative task, personal semantic memory predominated as self-supporting information in both groups. The amnesic participants generated fewer personal semantic memories than controls to support their self-statements, a deficit that was more pronounced for trait relative to role self-statements. In the episodic probe task, the controls primarily generated unique event memories, but the amnesic participants did not. These findings demonstrate that personal semantic memory, in particular autobiographical fact knowledge, plays a critical role in supporting the self-concept, regardless of the accessibility of episodic memories, and they highlight potential differences in the way traits and roles are supported by personal memory.

“Evocative and Luminous Phrases”: Reading Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

This essay reads Munro’s 2001 story collection as embodiment of her artistic accomplishment. Beginning with a 1952 internal Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reader noting “evocative and luminous phrases” in two of Munro’s earliest stories, it argues that such phrases have informed Munro’s fiction throughout her career. In Hateship, these phrasings are key to “Family Furnishings,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” “Post and Beam,” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and especially “Nettles.” There Munro structures her stories around “real facts in the making,” combining autobiographical facts and situations with her imaginative renderings of them. This collection reveals Munro at the height of her accomplished art.

Behavioral profiles in frontal lobe epilepsy: Autobiographic memory versus mood impairment.

Autobiographic memory encompasses the encoding and retrieval of episodes, people, and places encountered in everyday life. It can be impaired in both epilepsy and frontal lobe damage. Here, we performed an initial investigation of how autobiographic memory is impacted by chronic frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) together with its underlying pathology. We prospectively studied a series of nine consecutive patients with medically refractory FLE, relative to 24 matched healthy controls. Seven of the nine patients had frontal lobe structural abnormalities. Episodic and semantic autobiographic memory functioning was profiled, and factors associated with impaired autobiographic memory were identified among epileptologic, neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric, and cognitive variables including auditory-verbal and visual memory, and the executive function of cognitive control. Results showed that the FLE group experienced significantly higher rates of autobiographic memory and mood disturbance (p < 0.001), with detailed assessment of individual patients revealing two profiles of impairment, primarily characterized by cognitive or mood disturbance. Five of the patients (56%) exhibited significant episodic autobiographic memory deficits, whereas in three of these, knowledge of semantic autobiographic facts was preserved. Four of them also had reduced cognitive control. Mood disorder was largely unrelated to poor autobiographic memory. In contrast, the four cases with preserved autobiographic memory were notable for their past or current depressive symptoms. These findings provide preliminary data that frontal lobe seizure activity with its underlying pathology may selectively disrupt large-scale cognitive or affective networks, giving rise to different neurobehavioral profiles that may be used to inform clinical management.

Lie, truth, lie: the role of task switching in a deception context.

A cornerstone of the task switching literature is the finding that task performance is typically slower and more error-prone when the task switches than when it repeats. So far, deception research has largely ignored that such cognitive switch costs should also emerge when switching between truth telling and lying, and may affect the cognitive cost of lying as reflected in higher prefrontal brain activity and slower and less accurate responding compared to truth telling. To get a grasp on the relative size of the switch costs associated with lying and truth telling, the current study had participants perform a reaction time-based deception task, in which they alternated between lying and telling the truth to yes/no questions that were related to activities performed in the lab (Experiment 1) or neutral autobiographical facts (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the error and reaction time switch costs were found to be equally large for switching from truth telling to lying and from lying to truth telling. This symmetry in switch costs can be explained from the hypothesis that lying requires a first step of truth telling, and demonstrates that task switching does not contribute to the cognitive cost of lying when the repetition/switch ratio is balanced. Theoretical and methodological implications are considered.

Fact, Fiction, and History in Philip Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic"

This essay uncovers the factual and historical foundation for the dramatic situation in Philip Roth’s short story “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959) and explores Roth’s manipulation of that historical foundation as he constructs the fictional world of his story. Roth’s use of historical facts in this early story is all the more interesting given that, over the course of his long and prolific career, Roth has grown increasingly and more explicitly preoccupied with the ambiguous boundary between fact and fiction. With the creation of his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who first appeared as a primary character in The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth aroused readers’ curiosity about the border between autobiographical fact and fiction—a curiosity he subsequently complicated and exploited in works featuring a protagonist and first-person narrator named “Philip Roth” (such as Deception [1990], Operation Shylock [1993], and the alternative history The Plot against America [2004]). In these novels, Roth creates implicit meta-narratives in which the factual and the imaginary are each ironized in relation to the other. Operation Shylock begins with the author’s prefatory claim for the veracity of the narrative: “For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that . . . are of little significance to the overall story and its verisimilitude” (13). This disclaimer—a throwback to the eighteenthand nineteenth-century convention of novelists insisting on the authenticity of the subsequent narrative—is then given a postmodern twist in Roth’s postscript “Note to the Reader,” in which he now confesses, “This book is a work of fiction” and concludes with the final ambiguous statement, “This confession is false” (399). Which confession? The one comprising the body of the novel or the final “confession” he has just made, that the “book is a work of fiction”? The ambiguity is, of course, Roth’s postmodern joke, which he doggedly perpetuated in promoting the novel. Yet the seeds of the later Roth’s overt, postmodernist play with fact and fiction can be found in the covert manipulation of historical fact in his early story “Eli, the Fanatic.”

Age Differences in Children’s Autobiographical Fact Memory, Interpretation Memory and Relationship with Mother Attachment

Age Differences in Children’s Autobiographical Fact Memory, Interpretation Memory and Relationship with Mother Attachment

New Spellings: Auto-orthographies in Zami and Vanity of Duluoz

Concentrating on the fixation with names and the processes of naming and renaming in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and Jack Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–1946 (1968), this article will investigate the inner workings of these processes—and the creative, emancipative and regenerative possibilities that arise from them (in terms of both text and the ‘empirical world’)—in the context of ‘auto-orthography’. This notion combines autobiography and ‘self-spelling’ to elucidate the blurred lines that separate fiction and biographical fact, the deconstruction of which Jacques Derrida makes central to his work on autobiography, The Ear of the Other. The aim of the article is to demonstrate what these two states, of (auto)biographical fiction and fact, can lend to each other in combination; drawing on Derrida's theses, and later working through certain psychoanalytic and ‘schizoanalytic’ discourses, in order to discover how the respective authors' auto-orthographies interact with their own times and create pathways to the future.

Deterioration of the memory for historic events in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's disease

Retrograde memory decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has been evaluated using tests of past public knowledge, such as famous personalities and events, and tests of autobiographical memory. Reports of temporal gradients (TG) in retrograde amnesia have been inconclusive. Here, we compared the remembrance of famous historic events by patients with amnesic MCI and early AD using the newly developed Historic Events Test (HET). The HET demands knowledge about famous public events of the past 60 years divided into five time segments, and consists of three tasks, Recognition, Dating Accuracy, and Contextual Memory. In both patient groups, the performance was worse than in healthy controls. Memory performance of all time segments was uniformly affected by this kind of retrograde amnesia. There was no evidence of a TG, and memory decline was similar in all three tasks of the HET. In contrast, for the same patients tested at the same time, we had previously found a TG for autobiographical memory with better preservation of remote than recent memories (Leyhe, Müller, Milian, Eschweiler, & Saur, 2009). We propose that recall of more frequently retrieved remote autobiographical facts and incidents has become independent of the hippocampus, whereas more seldomly retrieved recent autobiographical memory and knowledge of famous events remain dependent on the hippocampus and will thereby be susceptible to the early neurodegenerative damage of the hippocampus in AD. Our assumption may reconcile the Cortical Reallocation Theory and the Multiple Trace Theory.

Fiction in the First Person, or Immoral Writing

complete “rejection of imitative poetry”—in other words, fiction. 1 Which speaks, he says, in the place of “those who have gone to war”: the real people, who have suffered in their flesh, who actually know the weight of words and the burden of the dead. 2,400 years ago, the idea that fiction could present a vision of reality as accurate as—or even truer than—a factual account was already subversive. I am a writer of metaphors, and of fiction; indeed, I have no choice. I write with familial mantras that are like damnations, but above all, I write with my imaginaire: my imaginary. If there is a particular strength to my fiction, which has been described as “empathetic,” it is that this writing offers a textual locus of identification. It’s astonishing, the power of the real-effect, which can provoke confusions, sensitivities, and outbursts, even the accusation of “psychic plagiarism” in the case of my latest novel, Tom is Dead. 2 This accusation sprang from the idea that to write in the first person about a period of mourning, one must have endured such an ordeal oneself. Otherwise, this narrative is of necessity usurped, or even copied outright. As if fiction were never anything but the plagiarism of a factual account. In slipping into the fictional skin of Tom’s mother, in searching for that aria’s voice, if I was thinking of a real person, it was my own mother, even though the story I invent in Tom is Dead has nothing to do with us. My books, and especially this one, are almost always—and deliberately—fiction. As it happens, the violent polemic that followed the publication of this novel in France compelled me to make public certain autobiographical facts to justify my having written a work from my imaginaire. There have been several attacks recently in France against other firstperson novels described as “extreme fiction.” In 2007, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat accused Jonathan Littell of “plagiarizing the dead” and “plagiarizing the Nazis” for The Kindly Ones. 3 In late 2009, Claude Lanzmann accused Yannick Haenel of usurpation and plagiarism because the novelist presented his own version of a historical figure, Jan Karski (interviewed by Lanzmann in Shoah), and did so by speaking for the character of Karski in a fictitious

Neuropsychoanalytic Findings in a Patient with Bilateral Lesions of the Amygdala

We present the clinical and neuropsychological findings of a patient with selective bilateral lesions of the amygdala. A detailed neuropsychological examination revealed a specific deficit of episodic autobiographic memory, while the memory related to autobiographic facts was intact. We also report the course of the patient’s psychoanalytic therapy, which he underwent for treatment of recurrent panic attacks. The most striking finding during therapy was the patient’s inability to produce free associations, which hampered adequate psychoanalytic interpretations and the psychoanalytic process in general. The selective memory impairment, the absence of free associations, and the occurrence of panic attacks despite bilateral lesions of the amygdala are discussed within the context of current neuroscientific findings. To our knowledge, this case study represents the first report of a psychoanalytic therapy in a patient with bilateral lesions of the amygdala.

Cholera in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice

The article sets the cholera motif in Thomas Mann's famous novella Death in Venice against the historical context from which it partially originates. It is shown that this motif, while undoubtedly appropriated to serve Mann's own poetic ends, has a solid grounding in historical and autobiographical fact, thus blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. The article illustrates the verifiable events of the outbreak of the Venetian cholera epidemic in May 1911, which Mann partly witnessed himself, during a holiday trip to Brioni and Venice, and partly heard and read about. It is established that Thomas Mann's account of the cholera in Venice in his novella is characterised by a rare and almost preternatural insightfulness into an otherwise murky affair that was marked by rumours, speculations and denials.

Changes in retrograde memory following temporal lobectomy

Extensive retrograde memory deficits have been detected in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and in patients who have undergone temporal lobectomy (TL). To date, no group study has used a prospective longitudinal design. We assessed memory for public and autobiographical facts and events in patients ( n = 15) with focal left- or right-sided TLE before and after TL using a battery of tests that covered the life span. Patients who underwent TL demonstrated material-specific memory decline in retrograde memory. Left TL was associated with a significant drop in recall of famous people’s names. Patients who underwent right TL exhibited a significant decline in the recall of autobiographical events from across the life span. Our study indicates for the first time that TL is associated with a risk of mild, material-specific retrograde memory decline. Verifications with a larger sample size and other measures of remote memory are needed.

Exploring the Phenomenology of Memory for Pain: Is Previously Experienced Acute Pain Consciously Remembered or Simply Known?

Whether or not acute pain is recalled by consciously remembering it or by simply knowing about that past pain as an autobiographical fact, and the degree to which it can be accurately anticipated ("precalled") was investigated using the remember/know paradigm. Cold Pressor (CP) pain was induced in 97 healthy participants who precalled CP pain and then reported their actual experiences of CP pain, using the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) and a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Two weeks later, participants recalled the CP pain and indicated whether each retrospectively selected MPQ descriptor reflected their "remembering" or "knowing" about the pain. Whereas precall ratings significantly underestimated the severity of actual CP pain, recall ratings did not differ significantly from actual CP ratings. Almost three quarters of the MPQ descriptors chosen at recall reflected sensations of CP pain that were clearly, consciously remembered. The proportions of "correct" MPQ descriptors and categories at recall were significantly greater when judged as remembered than when judged as known. These findings suggest that recollections of acute pain at 2 weeks involve episodic memory and to a lesser extent semantic memory, with the former being more accurate. Whether previously experienced pain is clearly, consciously remembered or merely recalled as semantic knowledge about one's personal past has never been empirically investigated. Establishing the relative contribution of different types of memory will allow a better understanding of the phenomenological experience of recalling acute pain.

Autobiographical memory deficits in schizophrenia

This study investigated autobiographical memory processes in a group of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched controls. The schizophrenia group displayed an overgeneral style of autobiographical memory retrieval on two widely used measures, and displayed problems retrieving both autobiographical facts and events. They showed a specific impairment in the recall of autobiographical events and facts in early adulthood, around the time of onset of their illness. Retrieval deficits were independent of mood state and premorbid intellectual functioning. The magnitude of the deficits in autobiographical memory retrieval specificity were considerably greater than any general impairments in episodic and working memory.

Effects of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy on Retrograde Memory

In a previous investigation (Lah et al., 2004), we found deficits in retrograde memory in patients who had undergone temporal lobectomy (TL). In this study, we set out to determine whether such deficits are present before surgery in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Memory for public and autobiographic facts and events was assessed in patients with focal left-sided (n=15) or right-sided (n=14) TLE and healthy control subjects (n=15). The impact of epilepsy and underlying cognitive deficits on retrograde memory also was examined. Patients with left TLE demonstrated retrograde memory deficits across domains. Patients with right TLE showed defective recall only in the autobiographic domain. Young age at onset (younger than 14 years) was associated with greater difficulties in recall of famous events, and patients receiving polytherapy had significantly reduced recall of autobiographic events compared with those receiving monotherapy. In most cases, deficient memory for the past was associated with impairments in other cognitive skills, especially language abilities. In unoperated-on patients with TLE, we found deficits in retrograde memory that were similar to those seen after TL, with the pattern of deficits being influenced by side of lesion, anticonvulsant medication, and word-finding deficits. Unlike patients tested after right TL, patients with right TLE did not have difficulty recalling details of famous events, which raises the possibility that right TL results in a decline in this aspect of retrograde memory.

A case of psychogenic fugue: I understand, aber ich verstehe nichts

Psychogenic fugue is a disorder of memory that occurs following emotional or psychological trauma and results in a loss of one’s personal past including personal identity. This paper reports a case of psychogenic fugue in which the individual lost access not only to his autobiographical memories but also to his native German language. A series of experiments compared his performance on a variety of memory and language tests to several groups of control participants including German–English bilinguals who performed the tasks normally or simulated amnesia for the German language. Neuropsychological, behavioral, electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging tests converged on the conclusion that this individual suffered an episode of psychogenic fugue, during which he lost explicit knowledge of his personal past and his native language. At the same time, he appeared to retain implicit knowledge of autobiographical facts and of the semantic or associative structure of the German language. The patient’s poor performance on tests of executive control and reduced activation of frontal compared to parietal brain regions during lexical decision were suggestive of reduced frontal function, consistent with models of psychogenic fugue proposed by Kopelman [The Handbook of Memory Disorders, 2nd ed., Wiley, Chichester, 2002, p. 451] and Markowitsch [Memory, Consciousness, and the Brain, Psychology Press, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 319].

Memory for autobiographical facts and events: a comparison of women reporting childhood sexual abuse and non‐abused controls

AbstractAlthough there is evidence that many adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) have a period when they forget their abuse, existing research is equivocal about whether such individuals show other autobiographical memory impairments. The present study addressed some of the sampling and measurement problems apparent in previous studies and compared 74 women reporting a history of CSA with 60 non‐abused controls on their ability to recall facts and events from childhood. The results showed that the CSA group did not differ from the controls in the quality of their memories for autobiographical incidents. However, they were significantly less able than controls to recall specific facts about their personal history, such as significant addresses and names of significant individuals, after controlling for educational level, depression and childhood address changes. CSA group participants reporting a period of abuse forgetting appeared more impaired than those with continuous abuse memories in their recall of personal semantic facts, but were similar in their recall of autobiographical incidents. The findings suggest that experiencing a period of abuse forgetting is a more influential factor in predicting the ability to recall personal semantic facts than abuse status alone. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Memory of elapsed time and feeling of time discrepancy.

In dating past events, one sometimes recalls inaccurate dates and tends to estimate recent events too remotely and remote events too recently (telescoping). On the other hand, even when one knows the exact dates of events, subjective time could be elastic and often different from objective time. This Feeling of Time Discrepancy between objective and subjective elapsed times was examined with two autobiographical events. Results showed that (1) subjects reported a discrepancy even if the exact dates of events were known and (2) the discrepancy for entrance into university was higher than that for graduation from high school, even when they happened at almost same time. The results are discussed in terms of "location" and "distance" theories, Kemp's 1999 associative model of dating, and Conway's 2000 self-memory system. Autobiographical memory may be organized in terms of present self-concept with our past fitted to the present self-concept. However, if autobiographical memory changes greatly, we cannot share autobiographical memory with other people. We may be adapted to the present life by making only a sense of the subjective elapsed time of each event change with the accurate time information of the autobiographical facts held.