Autobiographical Recollection and Affects of Cues in an Amnesic Patient

Abstract

The individual described herein (Y.K.) is a pure amnesic patient with severe anterograde amnesia and a selective loss of specific personal episodes in his remote memories. In this study, we examined whether more concrete cues could elicit specificity in his autobiographical memory. It was found that the richness of his autobiographical memory under the condition with probes was significantly higher than condition without probes, although Y.K.'s performance on recalling autobiographical memory was inferior to that of control subjects under both conditions. These results and our previous findings indicate that neither the disorder at the level of the framework's thematic retrieval nor the destruction of individual traces will account for the loss of Y.K.'s autobiographical memory. We suspect that Y.K.'s loss of autobiographical memory may be due to problems in the interface between thematic retrieval frameworks and individual traces.