Into the future with little past: exploring mental time travel in a patient with damage to the mammillary bodies/fornix

Tedder, Jacqui, Miller, Laurie, Tu, Sicong, Hornberger, Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2214-3788 and Lah, Suncica (2016) Into the future with little past: exploring mental time travel in a patient with damage to the mammillary bodies/fornix. Clinical Neuropsychologist, 30 (2). pp. 351-366. ISSN 1385-4046

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Abstract

Objective: Remembering the past and imaging the future are both manifestations of ‘mental time travel’. These processes have been found to be impaired in patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions. Here, we examined the question of whether future thinking is affected by other Papez circuit lesions, namely: damage to the mammillary bodies/fornix. Method: Case (SL) was a 43-year-old woman who developed dense anterograde and retrograde amnesia suddenly, as a result of Wernicke–Korsakoff’s syndrome. A region of interest volumetric Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis was performed. We assessed past and future thinking in SL and 11 control subjects of similar age and education with the adapted Autobiographical Interview (AI). Participants also completed a battery of neuropsychological tests. Results: Volumetric MRI analyses revealed severely reduced fornix and mammillary body volumes, but intact hippocampi. SL showed substantial, albeit temporally graded retrograde memory deficits on the adapted AI. Strikingly, whilst SL could not provide any specific details of events from the past two weeks or past two years and had impaired recall of events from her late 30s, her descriptions of potential future events were normal in number of event details and plausibility. Conclusions: This dissociation of past and future events’ performance after mammillary body and fornix damage is at odds with the findings of the majority of patients with adult onset hippocampal amnesia. It suggests that these non-hippocampal regions of the Papez circuit are only critical for past event retrieval and not for the generation of possible future events.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	thalamus,wernicke–korsakoff’s,diencephalic lesion,cognition,memory
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Mental Health Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Lifespan Health
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Apr 2016 15:00
Last Modified:	19 Oct 2023 01:40
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58169
DOI:	10.1080/13854046.2016.1142612

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