The interplay of emotional and social conceptual processes during moral reasoning in frontotemporal dementia.

Cooperative social behaviour in humans hinges upon our unique ability to make appropriate moral decisions in accordance with our ethical values. The complexity of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying moral reasoning is revealed when this capacity breaks down. Patients with the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) display striking moral transgressions in the context of atrophy to frontotemporal regions supporting affective and social conceptual processing.

Fronto-parietal contributions to episodic retrieval-evidence from neurodegenerative disorders.

Converging evidence suggests a critical role for the parietal cortices in episodic memory retrieval. Here, we examined episodic memory performance in Corticobasal Syndrome (CBS), a rare neurodegenerative disorder presenting with early parietal atrophy in the context of variable medial temporal lobe damage. Forty-four CBS patients were contrasted with 29 typical Alzheimer's disease (AD), 29 healthy Controls, and 20 progressive supranuclear palsy patients presenting with brainstem atrophy as a disease control group.

External details revisited - A new taxonomy for coding 'non-episodic' content during autobiographical memory retrieval.

Autobiographical memory (ABM) is typically held to comprise episodic and semantic elements, with the vast majority of studies to date focusing on profiles of episodic details in health and disease. In this context, 'non-episodic' elements are often considered to reflect semantic processing or are discounted from analyses entirely. Mounting evidence suggests that rather than reflecting one unitary entity, semantic autobiographical information may contain discrete subcomponents, which vary in their relative degree of semantic or episodic content.

Mental States in Moving Shapes: Distinct Cortical and Subcortical Contributions to Theory of Mind Impairments in Dementia.

Impaired capacity for Theory of Mind (ToM) represents one of the hallmark features of the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and is suggested to underpin an array of socioemotional disturbances characteristic of this disorder. In contrast, while social processing typically remains intact in Alzheimer's disease (AD), the cognitive loading of socioemotional tasks may adversely impact mentalizing performance in AD. Here, we employed the Frith-Happé animations as a dynamic on-line assessment of mentalizing capacity with reduced incidental task demands in 18 bvFTD, 18 AD, and 25 age-matched Controls.

Accelerated Long Term Forgetting in patients with focal seizures: Incidence rate and contributing factors.

Background: Accelerated Long Term Forgetting (ALF) is usually defined as a memory impairment that is seen only at long delays (e.g., after days or weeks) and not at shorter delays (e.

Evolution of autobiographical memory impairments in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia - A longitudinal neuroimaging study.

Compromised autobiographical memory (ABM) retrieval is well established in dementia, attributable to degeneration of a core memory brain network. It remains unclear, however, how the progressive spread of atrophy with advancing disease severity impacts ABM retrieval across life epochs. To this end, we conducted a longitudinal study of recent and remote ABM in Alzheimer's disease (AD, n =11), and a frontotemporal lobar degeneration group (FTD, n =13) comprising 7 behavioral variant FTD and 6 semantic dementia patients, in comparison with 23 healthy older Controls.

Damage to right medial temporal structures disrupts the capacity for scene construction-a case study.

The medial temporal lobes (MTLs) are widely held to support a range of constructive endeavors including remembering the past, envisaging the future, and imagining hypothetical scenarios. While right MTL structures have been ascribed a prominent role in the construction of spatial contexts, lesion evidence to directly test this hypothesis is lacking. To this end, we assessed scene construction performance in two cases, GC and DF, who presented with left- and right-lateralized presentations of semantic dementia, respectively.

Old dogs with new tricks: Detecting accelerated long-term forgetting by extending traditional measures.

Accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF) is a condition in which normal memory performance is displayed after short delays, but significant memory loss is detected when memory is tested after several days or weeks. This condition has been reported in patients with epilepsy, but there are few normative scores available for its detection in clinical practice. In the present study, we assessed 60 healthy control subjects 18-60years of age on three memory measures [Rey Auditory Verbal Learning (RAVLT), Logical Memory (LM), and Aggie Figures] at delays of 30min and 7days.

Influence of population versus convenience sampling on sample characteristics in studies of cognitive aging.

Purpose: We examined whether differences in findings of studies examining mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were associated with recruitment methods by comparing sample characteristics in two contemporaneous Australian studies, using population-based and convenience sampling.

Method: The Sydney Memory and Aging Study invited participants randomly from the electoral roll in defined geographic areas in Sydney. The Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle Study of Ageing recruited cognitively normal (CN) individuals via media appeals and MCI participants via referrals from clinicians in Melbourne and Perth.