Martinelli Pénélope, Piolino Pascale
Laboratoire Psychologie et Neurosciences cOgnitives, CNRS UMR 8189, Groupe Mémoire et Apprentissage, Université Paris Descartes.
Psychol Neuropsychiatr Vieil. 2009 Sep;7(3):151-67. doi: 10.1684/pnv.2009.0178.
Autobiographical memory is constituted by different representations including general knowledge about one's past (semantic component) and specific personal events (episodic component). Some old memories can remain very vivid because they are particularly important for the subject's identity. The aim of this paper is, in the first part, to present a review of the properties of these memories, called self-defining memories, which present episodic characteristics and are closely related to personal semantics and subject's identity model. In the second part, we analyse the results of a preliminary study designed to assess the effect of age on self-defining memories compared to episodic and semantic memories. The results show that the elderly subjects' performance is impaired during the retrieval of episodic memories, while no difference was found between young and older group for retrieving semantic and self-defining memories. However, self-defining memories were predominantly constituted of episodic characteristics in the two age groups. In spite of their episodic nature, their close relationship to the subject's identity model enables to maintain an efficient access to most specific details of memories in normal aging. These results could contribute to improve autobiographical memory rehabilitation in old patients with depression and Alzheimer's disease who suffer from overgeneralization of memories.
自传体记忆由不同的表征构成，包括关于个人过去的一般知识（语义成分）和特定的个人事件（情节成分）。一些旧记忆可能会一直非常清晰，因为它们对主体的身份特别重要。本文的目的是，在第一部分，对这些被称为自我定义记忆的记忆特性进行综述，这些记忆具有情节特征，并且与个人语义和主体身份模型密切相关。在第二部分，我们分析了一项初步研究的结果，该研究旨在评估年龄对自我定义记忆的影响，并与情节记忆和语义记忆进行比较。结果表明，老年人在情节记忆检索过程中的表现受损，而在语义记忆和自我定义记忆检索方面，年轻组和老年组之间未发现差异。然而，在两个年龄组中，自我定义记忆主要由情节特征构成。尽管它们具有情节性质，但它们与主体身份模型的密切关系使得在正常衰老过程中能够有效地获取记忆的大多数特定细节。这些结果可能有助于改善患有记忆过度泛化的老年抑郁症患者和阿尔茨海默病患者的自传体记忆康复。
