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Spontaneous confabulators fail to suppress currently irrelevant memory traces

Nature Neuroscience volume 2, pages 677–681 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

Human actions require integration of past experiences, ongoing percepts and future concepts. To adapt behavior to reality, the brain must identify mental representations of current relevance. Occasional amnesic subjects act according to invented stories ('spontaneous confabulations'), disregarding present reality. We used repeated runs of a continuous recognition task to measure the ability to distinguish currently relevant from previously encountered but currently irrelevant information. Spontaneous confabulators detected target items as accurately as nonconfabulating amnesics, but increasingly failed to suppress false-positive responses, confusing presentation in previous runs with presentation in the current run. Lesions involved the anterior limbic system: medial orbitofrontal cortex, basal forebrain, amygdala and perirhinal cortex or medial hypothalamus. We suggest that the anterior limbic system represents 'now' in human thinking by suppressing currently irrelevant mental associations.

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Figure 1: Design of the experiments.
Figure 2: Results of experiment 1 with meaningful designs (a, b) and experiment 2 with meaningless, geometric designs (c, d).
Figure 3: Lesion analysis of (a) the spontaneous confabulators and (b) the nonconfabulating amnesics.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. von Däniken for testing some of the patients and C.W. Hess, T. Landis, K. Gutbrod and E. Markus for helpful comments. Study supported by grant no. 32-50882.97 of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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  1. Division for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Bern and Clinique de Rééducation Hôpital Cantonal Universitaire, 26, av. de Beau-Séjour , Geneva, 14, CH-1211, Switzerland

    Armin Schnider & Radek Ptak

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Correspondence to Armin Schnider.

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Schnider, A., Ptak, R. Spontaneous confabulators fail to suppress currently irrelevant memory traces. Nat Neurosci 2, 677–681 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/10236

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