0000000000017393
AUTHOR
Chris J. A. Moulin
Persistent psychogenic déjà vu: a case report.
Introduction: Déjà vu is typically a transient mental state in which a novel experience feels highly familiar. Although extensively studied in relation to temporal lobe epilepsy as part of simple partial seizures, déjà vu has been less studied in other clinical populations. A recent review of temporal lobe epilepsy suggested a possible link between clinical levels of anxiety and debilitating déjà vu, indicating further research is required. Here, for the first time in the literature, we present a case study of a young man with anxiety and depersonalisation who reported experiencing persistent and debilitating déjà vu. This report therefore adds to the limited literature on the relationship …
An active inference and epistemic value view of metacognition
Metacognition concerns our monitoring and control of mental operations (knowing what you know). Much thinking about metacognition is liable to fall foul of the classic homunculus problem: Nobody can specify who or what does the "metacognition." We describe how the Active Inference and Epistemic Value (AIEV) model offers an operationalization of epistemic behaviors which can explain two example metacognitive phenomena: Control and monitoring of word learning, and the search for unretrieved information in the feeling of knowing. Curiosity drives a search forward, but it is held in check by considering the utility of what is retrieved from memory.
History repeating itself: Arnaud's case of pathological déjà vu.
International audience; We present a translation of Arnaud's (1896) case report of Patient Louis, a case he describes as having a pathological form of déjà vu. Louis has the delusional belief that the present moment is a repetition of an exact same previous event. Arnaud's paper is critical for two reasons. Firstly, it is amongst the first articles in the scientific literature to describe the déjà vu experience using the term 'déjà vu'. Secondly, the case report of someone with delusional and persistent déjà vu, anticipates recently reported cases with similar symptoms, which are beginning to gain interest as a particular form of memory disorder. We offer a contemporary analysis of Louis an…
The cognitive neuropsychology of recollection
The recognition of whether someone, something or somewhere has been experienced before rests on a decisionmaking process. In humanmemory, information is not reproduced as it would be in a computer, but is a reflective, conscious process. This is more so the case when encountering the same scene, environment or idea for a second time. When we recognize something as having been encountered before we arguably make a comparison between what is represented in the cognitive system and what is currently perceived. Consider that somebody uses the word ‘loquacious’, a word which you have only just encountered recently, and up until then, you did not know its meaning, or even existence. When encounte…
In the here and now: Short term memory predictions are preserved in Alzheimer's disease
According to neuropsychological models of anosognosia, there is a failure to transfer on-line awareness of dysfunction into a more generalised long term belief about memory function in Alzheimer's disease. This failure results in specific metamemory deficits for global predictions: patients overestimate their performance before the task but are able to monitor their memory performance after having experienced the task. However, after a delay, they are still not able to make accurate predictions. As previous work has mainly focused on long-term memory, the present study investigates this issue in short-term and working memory. Using both global and item-by-item metacognitive judgements in a …
Le jugement d’oubli dans la maladie d’Alzheimer
International audience; IntroductionAvez-vous déjà eu l’impression d’oublier quelque chose ? Le sentiment d’oubli est très commun dans la vie quotidienne mais a été très peu étudié expérimentalement.ObjectifsL’objectif de cette étude est d’évaluer les jugements d’oubli sur des tâches de mémoire sémantique et épisodique dans le vieillissement normal et dans la maladie d’Alzheimer.Patients et méthodesCinquante jeunes adultes, 35 personnes âgées et 33 patients Alzheimer ont été testés. Les participants effectuaient soit des jugements d’oubli, soit des jugements de rappel sur 2 tâches de mémoire. Pour la tâche de mémoire sémantique, les participants devaient rappeler toutes les régions de Franc…
Selective deficits in episodic feeling of knowing in ageing: A novel use of the general knowledge task
Failure to recall an item from memory can be accompanied by the subjective experience that the item is known but currently unavailable for report. The feeling of knowing (FOK) task allows measurement of the predictive accuracy of this reflective judgement. Young and older adults were asked to provide answers to general knowledge questions both prior to and after learning, thus measuring both semantic and episodic memory for the items. FOK judgements were made at each stage for all unrecalled responses, providing a measure of predictive accuracy for semantic and episodic knowledge. Results demonstrated a selective effect of age on episodic FOK resolution, with older adults found to have impa…
SenseCam: A new tool for memory rehabilitation?
International audience; The emergence of life-logging technologies has led neuropsychologist to focus on understanding how this new technology could help patients with memory disorders. Despite the growing number of studies using life-logging technologies, a theoretical framework supporting its effectiveness is lacking. This review focuses on the use of life-logging in the context of memory rehabilitation, particularly the use of SenseCam, a wearable camera allowing passive image capture. In our opinion, reviewing SenseCam images can be effective for memory rehabilitation only if it provides more than an assessment of prior occurrence in ways that reinstates previous thoughts, feelings and …
Disordered recognition memory: recollective confabulation.
Recollective confabulation (RC) is encountered as a conviction that a present moment is a repetition of one experienced previously, combined with the retrieval of confabulated specifics to support that assertion. It is often described as persistent deja vu by family members and caregivers. On formal testing, patients with RC tend to produce a very high level of false positive errors. In this paper, a new case series of 11 people with dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and with deja vu-like experiences is presented. In two experiments the nature of the recognition memory deficit is explored. The results from these two experiments suggest - contrary to our hypothesis in earlier publi…
Anosognosia and Metacognition in Alzheimer's disease: Insights from Experimental Psychology
International audience; While metacognition and anosognosia have long been studied as distinct concepts, more recently we have endeavored to construct a theoretical framework for exploring how metacognition can contribute to our understanding of anosognosia and vice versa. Following this approach, with a particular focus on Alzheimer's disease (AD), this chapter first gives an overview of the key experimental findings and issues on metacognition in AD patients: in particular, overconfidence and absolute awareness; the sensitivity approach; the fractionation of metacognition in AD; the neural substrates of metacognition in the Alzheimer brain; and metacognitive control in these patients. Sec…
Déjà vu experiences in healthy subjects are unrelated to laboratory tests of recollection and familiarity for word stimuli
Recent neuropsychological and neuroscientific research suggests that people who experience more déjà vu display characteristic patterns in normal recognition memory. We conducted a large individual differences study (n = 206) to test these predictions using recollection and familiarity parameters recovered from a standard memory task. Participants reported déjà vu frequency and a number of its correlates, and completed a recognition memory task analogous to a Remember-Know procedure. The individual difference measures replicated an established correlation between déjà vu frequency and frequency of travel, and recognition performance showed well-established word frequency and accuracy effect…
Eliciting the implicit: Metacognition in Alzheimer’s disease
The literature on metacognition in Alzheimer's disease points to there being implicit and explicit routes to the control and monitoring of memory. For instance, despite not being able to make predictions of performance which reflect future behavior, people with Alzheimer's disease can regulate effectively the amount of time they spend studying an item. Thus, empirical tasks from the metacognition literature shed some light on the idea of implicit awareness. But the complex pattern of preservation and impairment in metacognitive knowledge also points to other dimensions on which we need to consider patient awareness.
Anosognosia and Metacognition in Alzheimer’s Disease
While metacognition and anosognosia have long been studied as distinct concepts, more recently we have endeavored to construct a theoretical framework for exploring how metacognition can contribute to our understanding of anosognosia and vice versa. Following this approach, with a particular focus on Alzheimer’s disease (AD), this chapter first gives an overview of the key experimental findings and issues on metacognition in AD patients: in particular, overconfidence and absolute awareness; the sensitivity approach; the fractionation of metacognition in AD; the neural substrates of metacognition in the Alzheimer brain; and metacognitive control in these patients. Second, the chapter discuss…
What is French for déjà vu? Descriptions of déjà vu in native French and English speakers
Little is known about how people characterise and classify the experience of deja vu. The term deja vu might capture a range of different phenomena and people may use it differently. We examined the description of deja vu in two languages: French and English, hypothesising that the use of deja vu would vary between the two languages. In French, the phrase deja vu can be used to indicate a veridical experience of recognition - as in "I have already seen this face before". However, the same is not true in English. In an online questionnaire, we found equal rates of deja vu amongst French and English speakers, and key differences in how the experience was described. As expected, the French gro…
Know versus Familiar: Differentiating states of awareness in others’ subjective reports of recognition
In the Remember-Know paradigm whether a Know response is defined as a high-confidence state of certainty or a low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers and can influence participants' responses. The current experiment was designed to explore differences between the states of Know and Familiar. Participants studied others' justification statements to "Know" recognition decisions and separated them into two types. Crucially, participants were not provided definitions of Know and Familiar on which to sort the items--their judgements were based solely on the phenomenology described in the justifications. Participants' sorting decisions were shown to reliably map onto e…