Encoding specificity in the alcoholic Korsakoff patient

doi:10.1016/0093-934X(80)90115-7

Brain and Language

Volume 11, Issue 1, September 1980, Pages 119-127

https://doi.org/10.1016/0093-934X(80)90115-7 Get rights and content

Abstract

A previous attempt to improve amnesic Korsakoff patients' retention of individual words resulted in only moderate improvement and, then, only under restricted conditions. It appeared that this occurred because the patients “forget” the instructed analysis of the word as well as the word itself. Consequently, the two experiments reported here sought to provide feature (Experiment 1) or associated (Experiment 2) cues at both input and output. In this manner relatively good performance was obtained, but only when semantic cues were “strongly” associated to the target words. Implications for an encoding specificity interpretation are drawn from these results.

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Cited by (27)

A longitudinal study of confabulation
2017, Cortex
Citation Excerpt :
Some patients with significant memory impairment show confabulation, the production of statements and actions that are unintentionally incongruous to the patient's history, background, present and future situation (Dalla Barba, 1993a). This rather infrequent disorder is a classical and pathognomonic sign of Korsakoff's syndrome (Benson et al., 1996; Bonhoeffer, 1904; Cermak, Uhly, & Reale, 1980; Dalla Barba, Cipolotti, & Denes, 1990; Korsakoff, 1889; Mercer, Wapner, Gardner, & Benson, 1977; Wyke & Warrington, 1960). But confabulation is also observed in patients suffering from ruptured aneurisms of the anterior communicating artery, subarachnoid hemorrhage or encephalitis, head injury (e.g., Baddeley & Wilson, 1986; Dalla Barba, 1993b), Binswanger's Encephalopathy (Dalla Barba, 1993a); Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia (Attali, De Anna, Dubois, & Dalla Barba, 2009; Dalla Barba, Nedjam, & Dubois, 1999; Kern, Van Grop, Cummings, Brown, & Osato, 1992; La Corte, Serra, Boissé, & Dalla Barba, 2010; Nedjam, Dalla Barba, & Pillon, 2000; Nedjam, Devouche, & Dalla Barba, 2004) and aphasia (Sandson, Albert, & Alexander, 1986).
Confabulation, the production of statements and actions that are unintentionally incongruous to the subject's history, background, present and future situation, is a rather infrequent disorder, observed in several conditions affecting the nervous system. Little is known about the quantitative and qualitative evolution of confabulation in time. In this study we evaluated longitudinally the evolution of this disorder in a group of severe confabulators, using the Confabulation Battery (CB), a sensitive tool to detect confabulations in various memory domains. It was found that confabulations were stable over time and not temporally limited. It was also found that “Habits Confabulations” (HCs), i.e., habits and repeated personal events mistaken as specific, unique past and future personal episodes, or well-known public events when semantic knowledge is concerned, was the more frequently observed type of confabulation. Confabulations were also more prominent in the domain of Temporal Consciousness (TC), i.e., a specific form of consciousness that allows individuals to remember their personal past, to be oriented in their present world and to predict their personal future, than in Knowing Consciousness (KC), i.e., a specific form of consciousness allowing individuals to be aware of past, present and future impersonal knowledge and information. Confabulations showed also persistence, i.e., confabulations at the same questions over time, and consistency, i.e., same type of confabulation at the same question over time. These findings are discussed within the framework of the Memory, Consciousness and Temporality Theory.
Different patterns of recollection impairment in confabulation reveal different disorders of consciousness: A multiple case study
2016, Consciousness and Cognition
Citation Excerpt :
One such memory distortion is confabulation, that is the production of statements or actions that are unintentionally incongruous to the subject’s history, background, present and future situation (Dalla Barba, 1993a). This rather infrequent disorder is classically described in Korsakoff’s syndrome (Benson et al., 1996; Bonhoeffer, 1904; Cermak, Uhly, & Reale, 1980; Dalla Barba, Cipolotti, & Denes, 1990; Korsakoff, 1889; Mercer, Wapner, Gardner, & Benson, 1977; Schnider, Gutbrod, & Schroth, 1996; Talland, 1961; Wyke & Warrington, 1960). But confabulation is also seen in patients suffering from ruptured aneurisms of the anterior communicating artery, subarachnoid hemorrhage or encephalitis (Alexander & Freedman, 1984; Dalla Barba, Cappelletti, et al., 1997; De Luca & Cicerone, 1991; Delbecq-Derouesné, Beauvois, & Shallice, 1990; Diamond, De Luca, & Kelley, 1997; Irle, Wowra, Kunert, & Kunze, 1992; Kapur & Coughlan, 1980; Kopelman, Guinan, & Lewis, 1995; Luria, 1976; Moscovitch, 1989, 1995; Papagno & Muggia, 1996; Schnider, Gutbrod, et al., 1996; Stuss, Alexander, Lieberman, & Levine, 1978), head injury (Baddeley & Wilson, 1986; Dalla Barba, 1993b; Demery, Hanlon, & Bauer, 2001; Schnider, von Däniken, & Gutbrod, 1996; Weinstein & Lyerly, 1968), Binswanger’s Encephalopathy (Dalla Barba, 1993a), Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia (Dalla Barba et al., 1999; Kern, Van Grop, Cummings, Brown, & Osato, 1992; Nedjam, Dalla Barba, & Pillon, 2000; Nedjam, Devouche, & Daalla, 2004) and aphasia (Sandson, Albert, & Alexander, 1986).
Recollection is used to refer to the active process of setting up retrieval cues, evaluating the outcome, and systematically working toward a representation of a past experience that we find acceptable.
In this study we report on three patients showing different patterns of confabulation affecting recollection and consciousness differentially. All patients confabulated in the episodic past domain. However, whereas in one patient confabulation affected only recollection of events concerning his personal past, present and future, in another patient confabulation also affected recollection of impersonal knowledge. The third patient showed an intermediate pattern of confabulation, which affected selectively the retrieval of past information, both personal and impersonal. We suggest that our results are in favor of a fractionation of processes involved in recollection underling different disorders of consciousness.
The mammillary bodies and memory: More than a hippocampal relay
2015, Progress in Brain Research
Citation Excerpt :
However, others have questioned what the benefits of such a memory circuit might be and suggested that the medial diencephalon and medial temporal lobe support different aspects of memory (e.g., Parkin, 1984, 1996; Squire, 1981). Diencephalic amnesia has been proposed to specifically reflect an impairment in encoding (Butters and Cermak, 1980; Cermak et al., 1980; Huppert and Piercy, 1977; Sweeney-Reed et al., 2014; Vann and Aggleton, 2003; Wetzel and Squire, 1980); conversely, differences in forgetting rates between diencephalic and medial temporal lobe amnesics have been taken to suggest that the medial temporal lobe is particularly important for consolidation (e.g., Parkin, 1992; Squire, 1981) (but see Aggleton, 2008; Freed and Corkin, 1988; Freed et al., 1987; Kopelman, 2002; McKee and Squire, 1992; Parkin, 1992). A further dissociation between diencephalic and medial temporal lobe amnesia has been reported for temporal order memory, with diencephalic amnesics performing disproportionately worse on this aspect of memory (Hunkin and Parkin, 1993; Hunkin et al., 1994; Kopelman et al., 1997; Squire, 1982).
Although the mammillary bodies were one of the first neural structures to be implicated in memory, it has long been assumed that their main function was to act primarily as a hippocampal relay, passing information on to the anterior thalamic nuclei and from there to the cingulate cortex. This view not only afforded the mammillary bodies no independent role in memory, it also neglected the potential significance of other, nonhippocampal, inputs to the mammillary bodies. Recent advances have transformed the picture, revealing that projections from the tegmental nuclei of Gudden, and not the hippocampal formation, are critical for sustaining mammillary body function. By uncovering a role for the mammillary bodies that is independent of its subicular inputs, this work signals the need to consider a wider network of structures that form the neural bases of episodic memory.
"Do you remember what you did on March 13, 1985?" A case study of confabulatory hypermnesia
2009, Cortex
Citation Excerpt :
At a general level, confabulation can be referred to as a symptom observable in amnesic patients who are unaware of their memory deficit, and which consists of actions and verbal statements that are unintentionally incongruous to the patient's history, background, present and future situation (Dalla Barba, 1993a). This rather infrequent disorder is classically described in Korsakoff's syndrome (Benson et al., 1996; Bonhoeffer, 1904; Cermak et al., 1980; Dalla Barba et al., 1990; Korsakoff, 1889; Mercer et al., 1977; Schnider et al., 1996a, 1996b; Talland, 1961; Wyke and Warrington, 1960). But confabulation is also seen in patients suffering from ruptured aneurisms of the anterior communicating artery, subarachnoid haemorrhage or encephalitis (Alexander and Freedman, 1984; Dalla Barba et al., 1997a, 1997b; Delbecq-Derouesné et al., 1990; Irle et al., 1992; Kapur and Coughlan, 1980; Kopelman et al., 1995; Luria, 1976; Moscovitch, 1989, 1995; Papagno and Muggia, 1996; Schnider et al., 1996a, 1996b; Stuss et al., 1978), head injury (Baddeley and Wilson, 1986; Dalla Barba, 1993b; Schnider et al., 1996a, 1996b; Weinstein and Lyerly, 1968), Binswanger's Encephalopathy (Dalla Barba, 1993a), Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia (Dalla Barba et al., 1999; Kern et al., 1992; Nedjam et al., 2000, 2004) and aphasia (Sandson et al., 1986).
We report on a patient, LM, with a Korsakoff's syndrome who showed the unusual tendency to consistently provide a confabulatory answer to episodic memory questions for which the predicted and most frequently observed response in normal subjects and in confabulators is “I don't know”. LM's pattern of confabulation, which we refer to as confabulatory hypermnesia, cannot be traced back to any more basic and specific cognitive deficit and is not associated with any particularly unusual pattern of brain damage. Making reference to the Memory, Consciousness and Temporality Theory – MCTT (Dalla Barba, 2002), we propose that LM shows an expanded Temporal Consciousness – TC, which overflows the limits of time (“Do you remember what you did on March 13, 1985?”) and of details (“Do you remember what you were wearing on the first day of summer in 1979?”) that are usually respected in normal subjects and in confabulating patients.
Encoding specificity and intrusion in alzheimers-disease and amnesia
1995, Brain and Cognition
This study was designed to examine how the pattern of memory deficits and the interaction between episodic and semantic encoding/retrieval conditions influenced intrusions in a population of Alzheimer and amnesic patients. We used as a model for an encoding/retrieval experiment a 2x2 experimental design in which two encoding conditions are crossed with two retrieval conditions. It was found that encoding specificity affected intrusions only if patients, regardless of their clinical diagnosis, were grouped according to the type of memory impairment.
Diencephalic amnesia: a reorientation towards tracts?
1988, Brain Research Reviews
The principal thalamic and hypothalamic structures implicated in mnemonic information processing are the mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus, the pulvinar, anterior thalamus and laterodorsal nucleus, the mamillary body and the mamillothalamic tract and internal medullary lamina. Determining the contribution of an individual region in memory is quite difficult as it is nearly impossible to find a circumscribed damage of only one region. On the contrary, some illnesses affecting primarily the diencephalon, such as Korsakoff's disease, tend to involve several structures together. Furthermore, even when cases with similar circumscribed diencephalic damage can be found, these will not necessarily demonstrate the same outcome on the behavioral level. Therefore, the role or contribution of individual memory-related diencephalic structures has to be inferred by comparing a number of cases and by then extracting distinct features common to a given group. Such an approach revealed that the contributions of the two fiber systems mentioned above, mamillothalamic tract and internal medullary lamina, might be more important in processing information long-term than had been acknowledged previously and might be more important than that of the nuclear masses mentioned, especially of the mediodorsal thalamus. This outcome underlines the view that emphasizing interactions between brain regions rather than single static masses will provide a more realistic picture of how the nervous system acts in information processing.

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^☆: This research was supported by National Institute of Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse Grant AA-00187 to Boston University School of Medicine and by the Medical Research Service of the Veterans Administration.

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Encoding specificity in the alcoholic Korsakoff patient☆

Abstract

Neuropsychologia

Brain and Language

Brain and Language

Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories

Application and extension of the Connecticut category norms

Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph

Free association norms (Catalog No. D2102: F87)

The role of interference and encoding in the short-term memory deficits of Korsakoff patients

Neuropsychologia