Structural MRI Scan

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“In truth [memory] no longer represents our past to us, … if it still deserves the name of memory, it is because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.” (Bergson, 1910). This is a powerful statement with regards to amnesiac patients. KC suffered brain damage, and consequently amnesia, after a motorbike accident. “… KC may be said to have global anterograde amnesia (AA), and episodic retrograde amnesia (RA)”, Tulving (2002). Rosenbaum, Gilboa, Levine, Winocur, and Moscovitch, (2009) investigated whether KC had problems, with recalling, binding fragmented memories, and communicating information from semantic memory. To do this they used the fictional event test (FET), whereby all participants had to imagine a fictional but …show more content…

One reason for using the older MRI is that this was a volumetric scan, which shows decreases in volume across various regions in the brain (Rosenbaum et al., 005). They do not, however, consider further reductions of volume in the damaged areas. Notably, however, Rosenbaum and colleagues do acknowledge that damage in other regions cannot be ruled out. Different regions of the brain have also been evidenced to perform specific tasks such as encoding and retrieval (Tulving, 2002; Habib, Nyberg, Tulving, 2003). Rosenbaum et al., (2009) seem to have missed an opportunity to explain the change RA semantic performance from any of the alternative perspectives not …show more content…

Both retro and anterograde semantic memory were tested. KC was asked to imagine fictional events from pre, and post- morbidity. Results showed significant deficits in pre-morbidity, demonstrating that KC, may indeed have an issue imagining fictional events and binding detail and communicating the information cohesively, from retrograde AM. They acknowledge the Constructive Episodic Simulation hypothesis (Schacter, Addis, 2007), which entails using the past to create future or fictional events in the memory. This would explain KC’s deficit in imagining a fictional event; it was, however, dismissed because KC’s semantic detail is not in line with controls. This dismissal may be premature, as Rosenbaum et al., (2009) themselves, state that there is a deficit with binding and cohesion, thus KC would not necessarily be in line with