Department of Philosophy Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.
Loras College, Department of Psychology, Dubuque, Iowa, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Feb;110:104-112. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.07.028. Epub 2017 Jul 28.
Autobiographical remembering and future imagining overlap in their underlying psychological and neurological mechanisms. The hippocampus and surrounding regions within the medial temporal lobes (MTL), known for their role in forming and maintaining autobiographical episodic memories, are also thought to play an essential role in fictitious and future constructions. Amnesic individuals with bilateral hippocampal damage cannot reconstruct their past personal experiences and also have severe deficits in the ability to construct coherent fictitious or future narratives. However, it is not known whether this impairment reflects a failure to generate details from autobiographical episodic memory to populate personal narratives or an inability to bind such details into coherent narratives. We show that four individuals with hippocampal damage and episodic amnesia can construct narratives when the relevant details of the story are provided in a picture book and that their narratives maintain overall coherence on several measures. These findings indicate that individuals with hippocampal damage can bind details into coherent narratives when details are available to them. We conclude that the hippocampal system instead likely plays a role in the generation of details from which narratives are constructed.
自传体记忆和未来想象在其潜在的心理和神经机制上存在重叠。海马体及其周围的内侧颞叶（MTL）区域在形成和维持自传体情景记忆方面发挥着重要作用，也被认为在虚构和未来建构中发挥着至关重要的作用。双侧海马体损伤的健忘症患者无法重建他们过去的个人经历，并且在构建连贯的虚构或未来叙述的能力上也存在严重缺陷。然而，目前尚不清楚这种损伤是反映了无法从自传体情景记忆中生成细节来填充个人叙述，还是无法将这些细节整合到连贯的叙述中。我们表明，当故事的相关细节以图画书的形式呈现时，四名海马体损伤和情节性健忘症患者可以构建叙述，并且他们的叙述在几个方面保持整体连贯性。这些发现表明，当有细节可用时，海马体损伤的个体可以将细节整合到连贯的叙述中。我们得出结论，海马体系统可能在从构建叙述的细节的生成中发挥作用。
