Internal representations about the external world can be driven by the external stimuli or can be internally generated in their absence. It has been a matter of debate whether novel stimuli from the external world are instructive over the brain network to create de novo representations or, alternatively, are selecting from existing pre-representations hosted in preconfigured brain networks. The...

Midazolam is a drug that creates temporary anterograde amnesia. In a within-subjects, double-blind experiment, participants studied a list of stimuli after receiving an injection of midazolam in one session and after receiving saline in another session. The lists consisted of three types of stimuli: words, photographs, and abstract pictures. Recognition memory was tested at the end of each sess...

We describe the case of a 79-year-old patient referred for suspected transient global amnesia, after an episode of anterograde amnesia which lasted 90 min. An EEG, performed after the episode, showed bilateral temporal electrographic seizures, orienting the diagnosis toward a transient epileptic amnesia. Transient epileptic amnesia is defined by temporal lobe epilepsy characterized by recurrent...

A patient had neuropsychological testing during, and at two days and seven weeks after a transient global amnesia (TGA) attack. During the attack she exhibited a characteristically profound anterograde amnesia but a limited remote memory loss; the most striking impairment was a deficit in personal episodic memory revealed by her performance on the Autobiographical Memory Interview. Personal and...

Global anterograde amnesia is described in three patients with brain injuries that occurred in one case at birth, in another by age 4, and in the third at age 9. Magnetic resonance techniques revealed bilateral hippocampal pathology in all three cases. Remarkably, despite their pronounced amnesia for the episodes of everyday life, all three patients attended mainstream schools and attained leve...

Real-World Abilities with Anterograde Amnesia Melissa C. Duff,1 Tracey Wszalek,2 Daniel Tranel,1 and Neal J. Cohen3 1Department of Neurology, Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City, IA, USA 2Biomedical Imaging Center, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, IL, USA 3Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana–Champaign, ...

In this review, the clinical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging findings in the alcoholic Korsakoff syndrome and in thalamic amnesia, resulting from focal infarction, are compared. In both disorders, there is controversy over what is the critical site for anterograde amnesia to occur-damage to the anterior thalamus/mammillo-thalamic tract has most commonly been cited, but damage to the medio...

Lesions restricted to the hippocampal formation and/or extended hippocampal system (hippocampal formation, fornix, mammillary bodies, and anterior thalamic nuclei) can disrupt conscious recollection in anterograde amnesia, while leaving familiarity-based memory relatively intact. Familiarity may be supported by extra-hippocampal medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures. Within-task dissociations i...

For patients with hippocampal pathology, disagreement exists in the literature over whether retrograde amnesia is temporally limited or very extensive depending on whether the anatomical damage is restricted to this structure or also involves additional temporal cortex. We report a comprehensive assessment of retrograde and anterograde memory functions of a severely global amnesic patient (VC)....

Patient RB (Human amnesia and the medial temporal region: enduring memory impairment following a bilateral lesion limited to field CA1 of the hippocampus, S. Zola-Morgan, L. R. Squire, and D. G. Amaral, 1986, J Neurosci 6:2950-2967) was the first reported case of human amnesia in which detailed neuropsychological analyses and detailed postmortem neuropathological analyses demonstrated that dama...