High emotional experience during autobiographical retrieval in women with Korsakoff syndrome

Does Sex Matter? High Semantic Autobiographical Retrieval in Women and Men With Alzheimer's Disease

The decline of autobiographical memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is mainly characterized by overgenerality. While there is a large body of research on autobiographical overgenerality in AD, this research has mainly assessed retrieval with a dichotomy between specific vs. general retrieval. To go beyond this dichotomy, we assessed several degrees of autobiographical specificity in patients with AD, namely, we assessed specific vs. categoric vs. extended vs. semantic retrieval. We also assessed sex differences regarding these degrees of autobiographical specificity. We invited patients with mild AD and control participants to complete sentences (e. g., "When I think back to/of…") with autobiographical memories. Memories were categorized into specific, categoric, extended, or semantic memories. Results demonstrated more semantic than specific, categoric or extended memories in men and women with AD. In control participants, analysis demonstrated more specific than categoric, extended, and semantic memories in men and women. Also, no significant differences were observed between women and men with AD, or between control women and men, regarding specific, categoric, extended, and semantic memoires. This study offers not only a nuanced analysis of autobiographical specificity in patients with mild AD, but also an original analysis regarding this specificity by sex.

How Do Women and Men Look at the Past? Large Scanpath in Women during Autobiographical Retrieval—A Preliminary Study

While research has consistently demonstrated how autobiographical memory triggers visual exploration, prior studies did not investigate gender differences in this domain. We thus compared eye movement between women and men while performing an autobiographical retrieval task. We invited 35 women and 35 men to retrieve autobiographical memories while their gaze was monitored by an eye tracker. We further investigated gender differences in eye movement and autobiographical specificity, that is, the ability to retrieve detailed memories. The analysis demonstrated shorter fixations, larger duration and amplitude of saccades, and higher autobiographical specificity in women than in men. The significant gender differences in eye movement disappeared after controlling for autobiographical specificity. When retrieving autobiographical memory, female participants generated a large scan with short fixation and high saccade amplitude, while male participants increased their fixation duration and showed poorer gaze scan. The large saccades in women during autobiographical retrieval may constitute an exploratory gaze behavior enabling better autobiographical memory functioning, which is reflected by the larger number of autobiographical details retrieved compared to men.

"What Did I Tell This Sad Person?": Memory for Emotional Destinations in Korsakoff's Syndrome

We investigated destination memory, defined as the ability to remember to whom a piece of information was previously transmitted, for emotional destinations (i.e., a happy or sad person) in Korsakoff's syndrome (KS). We asked patients with KS and control participants to tell facts to neutral, positive, or negative faces. On a subsequent recognition task, participants had to decide to whom they told each fact. Compared with control participants, patients with KS demonstrated lower recognition of neutral, emotionally positive, and emotionally negative destinations. Patients with KS demonstrated lower recognition of emotionally negative than for emotionally positive or neutral destinations, but there were no significant differences between recognition of neutral and emotionally positive destinations. Our study demonstrates a compromised ability to process negative destinations in KS. Our study highlights the relationship between memory decline and impaired emotional processing in KS.