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Scene construction in developmental amnesia: An fMRI study

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sinead MullallyORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

Amnesic patients with bilateral hippocampal damage sustained in adulthood are generally unable to construct scenes in their imagination. By contrast, patients with developmental amnesia (DA), where hippocampal damage was acquired early in life, have preserved performance on this task, although the reason for this sparing is unclear. One possibility is that residual function in remnant hippocampal tissue is sufficient to support basic scene construction in DA. Such a situation was found in the one amnesic patient with adult-acquired hippocampal damage (P01) who could also construct scenes. Alternatively, DA patients' scene construction might not depend on the hippocampus, perhaps being instead reliant on non-hippocampal regions and mediated by semantic knowledge. To adjudicate between these two possibilities, we examined scene construction during functional MRI (fMRI) in Jon, a well-characterised patient with DA who has previously been shown to have preserved scene construction. We found that when Jon constructed scenes he activated many of the regions known to be associated with imagining scenes in control participants including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, retrosplenial and posterior parietal cortices. Critically, however, activity was not increased in Jon's remnant hippocampal tissue. Direct comparisons with a group of control participants and patient P01, confirmed that they activated their right hippocampus more than Jon. Our results show that a type of non-hippocampal dependent scene construction is possible and occurs in DA, perhaps mediated by semantic memory, which does not appear to involve the vivid visualisation of imagined scenes.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Mullally SL, Vargha-Khadem F, Maguire EA

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Neuropsychologia

Year: 2014

Volume: 52

Pages: 1-10

Print publication date: 01/01/2014

Online publication date: 11/11/2013

Acceptance date: 01/11/2013

Date deposited: 17/04/2014

ISSN (print): 0028-3932

ISSN (electronic): 1873-3514

Publisher: Elsevier

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.11.001

DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.11.001


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
G03000117/65439

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