Episodic memory refers to the recollection of personal experiences that contain information on what has happened and also where and when these events took place. Episodic memory function is extremely sensitive to cerebral aging and neurodegerative diseases. We examined episodic memory performance with a novel test in young (N = 17, age: 21-45), middle-aged (N = 16, age: 48-62) and aged but othe...

Neuronal mechanisms of episodic memory, the conscious recollection of autobiographical events, are largely unknown because electrophysiological studies in humans are conducted only in exceptional circumstances. Unit recording studies in animals are thus crucial for understanding the neurophysiological substrate that enables people to remember their individual past. Two features of episodic memo...

Episodic memory depends on a network of interconnected brain structures including the inferior temporal cortex, hippocampus, fornix, and mammillary bodies. We have previously shown that a moderate episodic memory impairment in monkeys with transection of the fornix is exacerbated by prior depletion of acetylcholine from inferotemporal cortex, despite the fact that depletion of acetylcholine fro...

BACKGROUND Alcoholism affects various cognitive processes, including components of memory. Metamemory, though of particular interest for patient treatment, has not yet been extensively investigated. METHODS  A feeling-of-knowing (FOK) measure of metamemory was administered to 28 alcoholic patients and 28 healthy controls during an episodic memory task including the learning of 20 pairs of ite...

The recently discovered hexanucleotide repeat expansion, C9ORF72, has been shown to be among the most common cause of familial behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and to be present in a significant minority of apparently sporadic cases. While mounting evidence points to prominent episodic memory dysfunction in bvFTD cases, recent reports have also suggested an amnestic profile i...

Current technology makes it increasingly feasible for personal assistance systems to create an augmented episodic memory that supplements their users’ own episodic memory. After considering the question of what such an augmented episodic memory might be useful for, we present a proof-of-concept system SPECTER that realizes this idea. We consider in turn the challenges of (a) automatically captu...

Studying episodic memory in nonhuman animals has proved difficult because definitions in humans require conscious recollection. Here, we assessed humans' experience of episodic-like recognition memory tasks that have been used with animals. It was found that tasks using contextual information to discriminate events could only be accurately performed using recollection, not familiarity. However,...

When remembering past events or imagining possible future events, older adults generate fewer episodic details than do younger adults. These results support the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis: deficits in retrieving episodic details underlie changes during memory and imagination. To examine the extent of this age-related reduction in specificity, we compared performance on memory a...

In this paper we present the development of an episodic memory module for the cognitive architecture controlling an autonomous mobile simulated robot, in a simulated 3D environment. The episodic memory has the role of improving the navigation system of the robot, by evoking the objects to be considered in planning, according to episodic remembrance of earlier contacts with those objects in the ...