It's not a lie … If you believe it: Narrative analysis of autobiographical memories reveals over-confidence disposition in patients who confabulate.

Humans perceive their personal memories as fundamentally true, and although memory is prone to inaccuracies, flagrant memory errors are rare. Some patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) recall and act upon patently erroneous memories (spontaneous confabulations). Clinical observations suggest these memories carry a strong sense of confidence, a function ascribed to vmPFC in studies of memory and decision making.

Differential involvement of the anterior and posterior hippocampus, parahippocampus, and retrosplenial cortex in making precise judgments of spatial distance and object size for remotely acquired memories of environments and objects.

The hippocampus is known to support processing of precise spatial information in recently learned environments. It is less clear, but crucial for theories of systems consolidation, to know whether it also supports processing of precise spatial information in familiar environments learned long ago and whether such precision extends to objects and numbers. In this fMRI study, we asked participants to make progressively more refined spatial distance judgments among well-known Toronto landmarks (whether landmark A is closer to landmark B or C) to examine hippocampal involvement.

Network Localization of Spontaneous Confabulation.

Objective: Spontaneous confabulation is a symptom in which false memories are conveyed by the patient as true. The purpose of the study was to identify the neuroanatomical substrate of this complex symptom and evaluate the relationship to related symptoms, such as delusions and amnesia.

Methods: Twenty-five lesion locations associated with spontaneous confabulation were identified in a systematic literature search.

Effects of Healthy and Neuropathological Aging on Autobiographical Memory: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using the Autobiographical Interview.

Objectives: A meta-analytic review was conducted to assess the effects of healthy aging, amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD) on naturalistic autobiographical memory using the Autobiographical Interview, a widely used, standardized assessment that derives measures of internal (episodic) and external (nonepisodic) details from freely recalled autobiographical narratives.

Methods: A comprehensive literature search identified 21 aging, 6 MCI, and 7 AD studies (total N = 1,556 participants). Summary statistics for internal and external details for each comparison (younger vs older or MCI/AD vs age-matched comparison groups) and effect size statistics were extracted and summarized using Hedges' g (random effects model) and adjusted for the presence of publication bias.

Neuropsychiatric Symptom Burden across Neurodegenerative Disorders and its Association with Function.

Objective: Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are prevalent in neurodegenerative disorders, however, their frequency and impact on function across different disorders is not well understood. We compared the frequency and severity of NPS across Alzheimer's disease (AD) (either with mild cognitive impairment or dementia), Cerebrovascular disease (CVD), Parkinson's disease (PD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and explored the association between NPS burden and function.

Methods: We obtained data from Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI) that included following cohorts: AD ( = 111), CVD ( = 148), PD ( = 136), FTD ( = 50) and ALS ( = 36).

Reduced modulation of BOLD variability as a function of cognitive load in healthy aging.

BOLD variability, which measures moment-to-moment fluctuations in brain signal, is sensitive to age differences in cognitive performance. However, the effect of aging on BOLD variability in the context of different cognitive demands is still unclear. The current study examined how aging affects brain variability across cognitive loads and the contribution of BOLD variability to working memory abilities.

Aging changes the interactions between the oculomotor and memory systems.

The use of multi-modal approaches, particularly in conjunction with multivariate analytic techniques, can enrich models of cognition, brain function, and how they change with age. Recently, multivariate approaches have been applied to the study of eye movements in a manner akin to that of neural activity (i.e.

Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory-Related Gaze Reinstatement.

Mounting evidence linking gaze reinstatement-the recapitulation of encoding-related gaze patterns during retrieval-to behavioral measures of memory suggests that eye movements play an important role in mnemonic processing. Yet, the nature of the gaze scanpath, including its informational content and neural correlates, has remained in question. In this study, we examined eye movement and neural data from a recognition memory task to further elucidate the behavioral and neural bases of functional gaze reinstatement.

Long-term fragility: Interference susceptibility may be an inherent characteristic of memory traces acquired through fast mapping.

Research in adults and in children has demonstrated that item-label memory traces created during Fast Mapping (FM) can be retained over extended time-periods but are also highly susceptible to interference. This could be an inherent and adaptive characteristic of inferential learning allowing rapid and prolonged retention while maintaining a hypothesis status for easy abandonment in case of new evidence suggesting erroneous inference. These characteristics dictate boundary conditions for learning through FM that are best investigated by examining memory dynamics rather than memory quantity and necessitate more nuanced interpretations than recent reviews of FM in children and adults offer.

The hippocampus is critical for value-based decisions guided by dissociative inference.

The hippocampus supports flexible decision-making through memory integration: bridging across episodes and inferring associations between stimuli that were never presented together ('associative inference'). A pre-requisite for memory integration is flexible representations of the relationships between stimuli within episodes (AB) but also of the constituent units (A,B). Here we investigated whether the hippocampus is required for parsing experienced episodes into their constituents to infer their re-combined within-episode associations ('dissociative inference').

No evidence of somatotopic place of articulation feature mapping in motor cortex during passive speech perception.

The motor theory of speech perception has experienced a recent revival due to a number of studies implicating the motor system during speech perception. In a key study, Pulvermüller et al. (2006) showed that premotor/motor cortex differentially responds to the passive auditory perception of lip and tongue speech sounds.