El Haj Mohamad, Antoine Pascal, Kapogiannis Dimitrios
Laboratoire SCALab CNRS UMR 9193, Department of Psychology, Research Unit on Cognitive and Affective Sciences University of Lille, France.
Laboratory of Neurosciences, Department of Neurosciences, National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, Maryland.
Hippocampus. 2015 Nov;25(11):1447-55. doi: 10.1002/hipo.22465. Epub 2015 Apr 18.
A striking similarity has been suggested between past and future thinking in Alzheimer's Disease (AD), a similarity attributable to abnormalities in common modular cognitive functions and neuroanatomical substrates. This study extends this literature by identifying specific executive function deficits underlying past and future thinking in AD. Twenty-four participants with a clinical diagnosis of probable (mild) AD and 26 older controls generated past and future events and underwent tests of binding and the executive functions of flexibility, inhibition, and updating. AD patients showed similar autobiographical performances in past and future event generation, and so did control participants. In each group, the similarity of past and future thinking was predicted by flexibility. Furthermore, AD patients with low flexibility showed higher similarity of past and future thinking than those with high flexibility. These findings are interpreted in terms of involvement of the hippocampus and frontal lobes in future thinking. Deficits in these brain regions in AD are likely to compromise the ability to recombine episodic information into novel and flexible configurations as scenarios for the future.
阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者过去思维与未来思维之间存在显著相似性，这种相似性可归因于常见模块化认知功能和神经解剖学基质的异常。本研究通过识别AD患者过去思维与未来思维背后的特定执行功能缺陷，扩展了这方面的文献。24名临床诊断为可能（轻度）AD的参与者和26名老年对照组生成过去和未来事件，并接受了绑定以及灵活性、抑制和更新执行功能的测试。AD患者在过去和未来事件生成中表现出相似的自传体表现，对照组参与者也是如此。在每组中，过去思维与未来思维的相似性由灵活性预测。此外，灵活性低的AD患者比灵活性高的患者表现出更高的过去思维与未来思维相似性。这些发现从海马体和额叶参与未来思维的角度进行了解释。AD患者这些脑区的缺陷可能会损害将情景信息重组为新颖灵活的未来情景配置的能力。
