Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Feb;110:84-91. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.03.013. Epub 2017 Mar 10.
Autobiographical memories are not stored in isolation but rather are organized into life chapters, higher-order knowledge structures that represent major themes conveying the arc of one's life. Neuropsychological studies have revealed that both episodic memory and some aspects of personal semantic memory are impaired in adults with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage. However, whether such impairment compromises the retrieval and formation of life chapters is unknown. Therefore, we had 10 adults with MTL amnesia and 20 control participants narrate their life stories, and we extracted life chapters from these narratives using a novel scoring protocol. For the retrograde and anterograde time period separately, we evaluated the number of life chapters and assessed their quality, as indexed by measures of complexity and richness. Additionally, to investigate the idea that formation of life chapters occurs on a protracted time scale, we separated the amnesic participants into an early-life and a later-life onset subgroup. Results revealed that early-onset, but not later-onset, amnesic participants generated fewer retrograde life chapters than controls. The higher-order temporal relation among retrograde chapters, but not their thematic relation or the richness of individual life chapters, was impaired in both amnesic subgroups. The amnesic participants also generated fewer anterograde life chapters than controls, and the richness of their anterograde chapters was reduced in terms of content, but not self-reflection. Findings suggest that the organization of autobiographical content into life chapters is a protracted process that depends on the MTL, as does retrieval of higher order temporal relations among life chapters.
自传体记忆不是孤立存储的，而是组织成生活章节，即代表人生轨迹的主要主题的高阶知识结构。神经心理学研究表明，内侧颞叶（MTL）损伤的成年人的情节记忆和某些个人语义记忆方面都受到损害。然而，这种损害是否会影响生活章节的检索和形成尚不清楚。因此，我们让 10 名 MTL 健忘症成年人和 20 名对照组参与者讲述他们的生活故事，并使用新的评分方案从这些叙述中提取生活章节。对于逆行和顺行时间段，我们分别评估了生活章节的数量，并评估了其质量，指标包括复杂性和丰富度。此外，为了研究生活章节的形成是在一个漫长的时间尺度上发生的想法，我们将健忘症参与者分为早期发病和晚期发病亚组。结果表明，早期发病的健忘症参与者比对照组生成的逆行生活章节更少，而晚期发病的健忘症参与者则没有。逆行章节之间的高阶时间关系，而不是主题关系或个别生活章节的丰富度，在两个健忘症亚组中都受到损害。健忘症参与者生成的顺行生活章节也比对照组少，而且他们的顺行章节在内容方面的丰富度降低，但自我反思方面没有降低。研究结果表明，将自传体内容组织成生活章节是一个依赖于 MTL 的漫长过程，回忆生活章节之间的高阶时间关系也是如此。
