Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 35, Issue 7, July 1997, Pages 1017-1034
Neuropsychologia

Strategic retrieval and the frontal lobes: Evidence from confabulation and amnesia

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3932(97)00028-6Get rights and content

Abstract

Confabulation and amnesia are considered disorders of episodic but not of semantic memory. To test the limits of this view, retrieval from episodic and semantic memory was investigated in eight confabulating and nine non-confabulating amnesic subjects, and in 17 matched control subjects, by using a personal and an historical version of the Crovitz [Unconstrained search in long-term memory, Paper presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St Louis, MO, 1973] cue-word test. In response to cue words such as letter or battle subjects had to describe in detail, respectively, a related event from their personal lives or from history before their birth. We found that a subset of amnesic subjects, those with presumed damage or dysfunction in the region of the ventromedial frontal cortex, would confabulate in response to these cues. Their confabulations involved semantic, historical memories, as much as episodic, personal ones: and that distortions of content were at least as common as those of time. Even when not confabulating, they had much more difficulty than other amnesic subjects in recovering memories related to these cues. In confabulating, as compared to non-confabulating, amnesic subjects, prompting led to an increase in confabulations but also to greater recovery of veridical memories. By comparison, non-confabulating amnesic subjects whose memory loss was as severe as that of the confabulators, had a milder deficit on the personal as well as the historical cue-word test. They benefited from prompting somewhat more than matched control subjects. These results suggest that confabulation is associated with impaired strategic retrieval processes resulting from damage in the region of the ventromedial frontal cortex. These strategic retrieval processes help initiate and guide search in episodic and in semantic memory and they help monitor and organize the output from those systems.

References (113)

  • T.K. Landauer

    A multicopy storage and random access model of memory

    Cognitive Psychology

    (1975)
  • F. Lhermitte et al.

    The amnesic syndromes and the hippocampal mammillary system

  • B. Mercer et al.

    A study of confabulation

    Archives of Neurology

    (1977)
  • B. Milner et al.

    Frontal lobes and the temporal organization of memory

    Human Neurobiology

    (1985)
  • L. Nyberg et al.

    PET studies of encoding and retrieval

    Psychonomic Bulletin and Review

    (1996)
  • A.J. Parkin et al.

    Recollective experience, normal aging, and frontal dysfunction

    Psychology and Aging

    (1992)
  • D.L. Schacter

    Memory, amnesia, and frontal-lobe dysfunction

    Psychobiology

    (1987)
  • D.L. Schacter et al.

    Richard Semon's Theory of memory

    Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

    (1978)
  • D.L. Schacter et al.

    Retrieval without recollection: An experimental analysis of source amnesia

    Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

    (1984)
  • D.L. Schacter et al.

    The neuropsychology of memory illusions: False recall and recognition in amnesic patients

    Journal of Memory and Language

    (1996)
  • W.B. Scoville et al.

    Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions

    Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry

    (1957)
  • D.T. Stuss et al.

    Organizational strategies of patients with unilateral or bilateral frontal lobe injury in word list learning

    Neuropsychology

    (1994)
  • M.P. Alexander et al.

    Amnesia after anterior communicating artery aneurysm

    Neurology

    (1984)
  • A. Baddeley et al.

    Amnesia, autobiographical memory and confabulation

  • J. Barbizet

    Defect of memorizing of hippocampal-mammillary origin: a review

    Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry

    (1963)
  • N. Berlyne

    Confabulation

    British Journal of Psychiatry

    (1972)
  • K. Bonhoeffer

    Der korsakowsche Sympto-menkomplex in seinen Beziehungen zu den verschieden Krankheitsformen

    Allgemeine Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie und Psychisch-Geritliche Medicin

    (1904)
  • P.W. Burgess et al.

    Confabulation and the control of recollection

    Memory

    (1996)
  • Cabeza, R. Kapur, S. Craik, F. I. M., McIntosh, A. R., Houle, S. and Tulving, E., Functional neuroanatomy of recall and...
  • E. Clapariède

    Recognition et moïté

    Archives de Psychologie

    (1911)
  • M.A. Conway

    A structural model of autobiographical memory

  • H. Crovitz

    Unconstrained search in long-term memory

  • H.F. Crovitz et al.

    Frequency of episodic memories as a function of their age

    Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society

    (1974)
  • G. Dalla Barba

    Confabulation: Knowledge and recollective experience

    Cognitive Neuropsychology

    (1993)
  • G. Dalla Barba

    Confabulation: Remembering ‘another’ past

  • G. Dalla Barba

    Different patterns of confabulation

    Cortex

    (1993)
  • P. Dall'Ora et al.

    Autobiographical memory

    Its impairment in amnesic syndromes

    Cortex

    (1989)
  • J. DeLuca

    Predicting neurobehavioural patterns following anterior communicating artery aneurysm

    Cortex

    (1993)
  • J. DeLuca et al.

    Aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery: A review of neuroanatomical and neuropsychological sequelae

    Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology

    (1995)
  • E. De Renzi et al.

    Dense retrograde amnesia, intact learning capability and abnormal forgetting rate: A consolidation deficit?

    Cortex

    (1993)
  • R.S. Fisher et al.

    Neuropsychological and neuroanatomical correlates of confabulation

    Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology

    (1995)
  • P.C. Fletcher et al.

    Brain systems for encoding and retrieval of auditory-verbal memory: An in vivo study in humans

    Brain

    (1995)
  • J. Fodor

    The Modularity of Mind

    (1983)
  • W.J. Friedman

    Memory for the time of past events

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1993)
  • G. Gainotti

    Confabulation of denial in senile dementia

    Psychiatria Clinica

    (1975)
  • F. Galton

    Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development

    (1883)
  • F.B. Gershberg et al.

    Impaired use of organizational strategies in free recall following frontal lobe damage

    Neuropsychologia

    (1995)
  • A. Incisa della Rochetta

    Classification and recall of pictures after unilateral frontal or temporal lobectomy

    Cortex

    (1986)
  • A. Incissa della Rochetta et al.

    Strategic search and retrieval inhibition: the role of the frontal lobes

    Neuropsychologia

    (1991)
  • R. Joseph

    Confabulation and delusional denial: Frontal lobe and lateralized influences

    Journal of Clinical Psychology

    (1986)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text