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Is Autobiographical Impairment Due to a Deficit of Recollection? An overview of Studies on Alzheimer Dements, Frontal and Global Amnesic Patients

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Theoretical Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((ASID,volume 65))

Abstract

The hypothesis is discussed that retrieving autobiographical information through the remote memory archives is mainly an organizational, searching task. The organizational activity involved in AB-retrieving is believed to take the form of Williams’ (1978) “recollection” process. It is agreed that planning is one functional aspect of attention, and in this way recollection should be viewed as a mainly attention-driven, step-wise planned activity. On the grounds above, the assumption is made that there should be a substantial number of frontally damaged patients, possibly dysexecutive in behaviour, who are impaired on AB-retrieval as a consequence of impaired recollection. Patients sharing damage to their rostral neocortex are easily found, as well as patients selectively bereft of all, or part of, their pre-frontal areas (frontal patients, F/pts), among most Alzheimer dements (AD/pts) and global amnesics (GA/pts), whose amnesia followed widespread brain-damage (viz., an extra-cerebral anoxic insult). For this reason, the patients in our studies belong to the neurological categories above. What we are going to present in this chapter, along with fresh findings, is an attempt to lend common understanding to neuropsychological findings on autobiographical memory (ABM) that we have collected over the past three years (Borrini et al., 1989; Dall’Ora et al., 1989; Della Sala et al., submitted).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Milan, Italy

    Sergio della Sala

  2. Neuropsychological Unit, Clinica del Lavoro Foundation, Veruno, Italy

    Sergio della Sala, Marcella Laiacona & Cristina Trivelli

  3. First Neurological Department, University of Milan, Italy

    Hans Spinnler

Authors
  1. Sergio della Sala
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  2. Marcella Laiacona
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  3. Hans Spinnler
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  4. Cristina Trivelli
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Lancaster, UK

    Martin A. Conway

  2. Department of Psychology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    David C. Rubin

  3. First Neurological Department, University of Milan, Italy

    Hans Spinnler

  4. Faculty of Social Sciences, Unit of Experimental and Theoretical Psychology, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Willem A. Wagenaar

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della Sala, S., Laiacona, M., Spinnler, H., Trivelli, C. (1992). Is Autobiographical Impairment Due to a Deficit of Recollection? An overview of Studies on Alzheimer Dements, Frontal and Global Amnesic Patients. In: Conway, M.A., Rubin, D.C., Spinnler, H., Wagenaar, W.A. (eds) Theoretical Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory. NATO ASI Series, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7967-4_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7967-4_26

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