Monday's Seminar welcome Valentina LACORTE (Enseignante Chercheuse Paris-Cité) - Laboratoire Mémoire, Cerveau et Cognition
When: April 27th
Where: Salle des Voûtes
Title: Distorted temporal consciousness in confabulating patients.
Confabulation is a particular symptom observable in some amnesic patients, unaware of their memory deficit, which consists of statements that are unintentionally incongruous to the patient’s history, background, present and future situation (Dalla Barba, 1993).
Some accounts emphasize the role of a frontal/executive dysfunction in confabulating patients, mainly related to the role of strategic retrieval and monitoring processes (Moscovich & Melo, 1997). On the other hand, some theoretical accounts have explained confabulation as the results of an impairment involving temporality. According to the Memory, Consciousness, and Temporality Theory (MCTT) (Dalla Barba, 2002), confabulation is not a pure memory disorder, but a disorder involving temporal consciousness (TC). TC means became aware of something as part of a personal past, present or future. Here we present neuropsychological and experimental evidence with findings from different studies realized in amnesic confabulating patients of various neurological etiologies, showing a dysfunction of TC. Indeed, clinical and experimental observations have shown that patients who confabulate retrieve personal habits, repeated events or over-learned information and mistake them for experienced, specific, unique events (i.e habits confabulations). (La Corte et al., 2010; 2011; 2016).
Furthermore, in a recent systematic review and a meta-analysis we show that i) 62 % of confabulating patients had lesions over at least one region of frontal lobe and only 17 % showed lesions over temporal regions ii) confabulating patients without temporal lesions produced significantly more confabulation in temporal consciousness domain.
We discuss our results within the framework of the MCTT (Dalla Barba, 2002) and the others cognitive models proposed in the literature to explain the cognitive mechanisms underlying confabulation in particular the frontal/executive account. Moreover, we discuss our neurocognitive model which state that the hippocampus is the neural correlate of temporal consciousness, which is lost in classical amnesia and present, but malfunctioning in confabulation (Dalla Barba & La Corte, 2013).
Dalla Barba, G. (1993). Different patterns of confabulation. Cortex, 29(4), 567-581.
Dalla Barba, G. (2002). Memory, consciousness and temporality (Vol. 3). Springer Science & Business Media.
Dalla Barba, G., & La Corte, V. (2013). The hippocampus, a time machine that makes errors. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(3), 102-104.
La Corte, V., Serra, M., Attali, E., Boisse, M. F., & Dalla Barba, G. (2010). Confabulation in Alzheimer’s disease and amnesia: A qualitative account and a new taxonomy. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(6), 967-974.
La Corte, V., George, N., Pradat-Diehl, P., & Barba, G. D. (2011). Distorted temporal consciousness and preserved knowing consciousness in confabulation: A case study. Behavioural Neurology, 24(4), 307-315.
La Corte, V., Serra, M., George, N., Pradat-Diehl, P., & Dalla Barba, G. (2016). Different patterns of recollection impairment in confabulation reveal different disorders of consciousness: A multiple case study. Consciousness and Cognition, 42, 396-406.
Moscovitch, M., & Melo, B. (1997). Strategic retrieval and the frontal lobes: Evidence from confabulation and amnesia. Neuropsychologia, 35(7), 1017-1034.