The self-reference effect in dementia: Differential involvement of cortical midline structures in Alzheimer’s disease and behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia

Encoding information in reference to the self enhances subsequent memory for the source of this information. In healthy adults, self-referential processing has been proposed to be mediated by the cortical midline structures (CMS), with functional differentiation between anterior-ventral, anterior-dorsal and posterior regions. While both Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients show source memory impairment, it remains unclear whether they show a typical memory advantage for self-referenced materials. We also sought to identify the neural correlates of this so-called ‘self-reference effect’ (SRE) in these patient groups. The SRE paradigm was tested in AD (n=16) and bvFTD (n=22) patients and age-matched healthy controls (n=17). In this task, participants studied pictures of common objects paired with one of two background scenes (sources) under self-reference or other-reference encoding instructions, followed by an item and source recognition memory test. Voxel-based morphometry was used to investigate correlations between SRE measures and regions of grey matter atrophy in the CMS. The behavioural results indicated that self-referential encoding did not ameliorate the significant source memory impairments in AD and bvFTD patients. Furthermore, the reduced benefit of self-referential relative to other-referential encoding was not related to general episodic memory deficits. Our imaging findings revealed that reductions in the SRE were associated with atrophy in the anterior-dorsal CMS across both patient groups, with additional involvement of the posterior CMS in AD and anterior-ventral CMS in bvFTD. These findings suggest that although the SRE is comparably reduced in AD and bvFTD, this arises due to impairments in different subcomponents of self-referential processing

Response: Commentary: Greater Emotional Gain from Giving in Older Adults: Age-Related Positivity Bias in Charitable Giving

3 pagesWe thank Hargis and Oppenheimer (2016) for their interesting commentary to our article (Bjälkebring et al., 2016). Age-related changes in decision making are indeed a relatively unexplored phenomenon especially when it comes to more specific decision situations such as prosocial acts

Should I trust you? Learning and memory of social interactions in dementia

Social relevance has an enhancing effect on learning and subsequent memory retrieval. The ability to learn from and remember social interactions may impact on susceptibility to financial exploitation, which is elevated in individuals with dementia. The current study aimed to investigate learning and memory of social interactions, the relationship between performance and financial vulnerability and the neural substrates underpinning performance in 14 Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 20 behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients and 20 age-matched healthy controls. On a “trust game” task, participants invested virtual money with counterparts who acted either in a trustworthy or untrustworthy manner over repeated interactions. A non-social “lottery” condition was also included. Participants’ learning of trust/distrust responses and subsequent memory for the counterparts and nature of the interactions was assessed. Carer-rated profiles of financial vulnerability were also collected. Relative to controls, both patient groups showed attenuated learning of trust/distrust responses, and lower overall memory for social interactions. Despite poor learning performance, both AD and bvFTD patients showed better memory of social compared to non-social interactions. Importantly, better memory for social interactions was associated with lower financial vulnerability in AD, but not bvFTD. Learning and memory of social interactions was associated with medial temporal and temporoparietal atrophy in AD, whereas a wider network of frontostriatal, insular, fusiform and medial temporal regions was implicated in bvFTD. Our findings suggest that although social relevance influences memory to an extent in both AD and bvFTD, this is associated with vulnerability to financial exploitation in AD only, and is underpinned by changes to different neural substrates. Theoretically, these findings provide novel insights into potential mechanisms that give rise to vulnerability in people with dementia, and open avenues for possible interventions

Differential effects of valence and encoding strategy on internal source memory and judgments of source: exploring the production and the self-reference effect

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01326/full#supplementary-materialItem memory studies show that emotional stimuli are associated with improved memory performance compared to neutral ones. However, emotion-related effects on source memory are less consistent. The current study probed how emotional valence and specific encoding conditions influence internal source memory performance and judgments of source (JOSs). In two independent experiments, participants were required to read silently/aloud (Experiment 1) or to perform self-reference/common judgments (Experiment 2) on a list of negative/neutral/positive words. They also performed immediate JOSs ratings for each word. The study phase was followed by a test phase in which participants performed old-new judgments. In Experiment 1, the production effect was replicated for item memory, but the effects of valence on item and source memory were not significant. In Experiment 2, self-referential processing effects on item and source memory differed as a function of valence. In both experiments, JOSs ratings were sensitive to valence and encoding conditions, although they were not predictive of objective memory performance. These findings demonstrate that the effects of valence on internal source memory and JOSs are modulated by encoding strategy. Thus, the way information is encoded can shed light on how emotion might enhance, impair or exert no influence on source memory.This work was supported by a Ph.D. Fellowship (PD/BD/105964/2014), awarded to DP, funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) through national funds and cofunded by the European Social Fund (ESF) through the Operational Programme for Human Capital (POCH). It was also supported by a research grant (PTDC/MHC-PCN/0101/2014) funded by FCT and awarded to AP. The study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), School of Psychology, University of Minho, and supported by FCT and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (UID/PSI/01662/2019), through the national funds (PIDDAC) and co-funded by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653)

Neuroimaging the consciousness of self: Review, and conceptual-methodological framework

We review neuroimaging research investigating self-referential processing (SRP), that is, how we respond to stimuli that reference ourselves, prefaced by a lexical-thematic analysis of words indicative of “self-feelings”. We consider SRP as occurring verbally (V-SRP) and non-verbally (NV-SRP), both in the controlled, “top-down” form of introspective and interoceptive tasks, respectively, as well as in the “bottom-up” spontaneous or automatic form of “mind wandering” and “body wandering” that occurs during resting state. Our review leads us to outline a conceptual and methodological framework for future SRP research that we briefly apply toward understanding certain psychological and neurological disorders symptomatically associated with abnormal SRP. Our discussion is partly guided by William James’ original writings on the consciousness of self

Les troubles mnésiques épisodiques dans la maladie d Alzheimer (étude des relations entre la mémoire et le soi)

Le symptôme majeur de la maladie d'Alzheimer réside en des troubles de mémoire épisodique massifs dont les premiers signes alertent en général l'entourage des patients. Le retentissement de ces troubles dans la vie des malades est important et fait partie des causes qui déterminent leur institutionnalisation. L'objectif principal de cette thèse était d'apporter une interprétation cognitive et affective de ces troubles au travers de l'étude des relations qu'entretiennent le self et la mémoire. L'ensemble de nos résultats confirme que les patients Alzheimer présentent un déficit de conscience autonoétique qui se traduit par leur incapacité à revivre mentalement des évènements du passé. La conscience noétique des patients semble rester, quant à elle, relativement préservée, au moins jusqu'à un stade modéré de la maladie d'Alzheimer. Ces difficultés de prise de conscience du self dans le passé pourrait expliquer les oublis caractéristiques de cette pathologie : les patients ne pourraient plus accéder aux images leur permettant de valider ou non l'exécution d'un plan d'action. En effet, ce travail de thèse met en évidence que la structure cognitive responsable de la gestion des buts, le self cognitif, connaît des dysfonctionnements au cours de la maladie d'Alzheimer. Défaillant, le self cognitif exercerait alors un biais de contrôle pathologique sur la cognition des patients, se traduisant par une importance plus grande accordée au principe de cohérence qu'au principe de correspondance...Episodic memory deficits are almost always the first cognitive impairment in Alzheimer s disease (AD). They often alert people around the patient at first sight. Consequences of such troubles in the AD patient s daily life become a decisive factor when the question of the institutionalization appears. The aim of this study was first to give a cognitive and affective interpretation of the episodic impairments through the examination of the relationship between memory and self. In overall, our results confirm that AD patients experience specific difficulty accessing autonoetic consciousness, that is to say mentally bring back events of the past, whereas noetic consciousness remains well-preserved, at least until a moderate stage of the disease Those difficulties with autonoetic consciousness could explain some typical episodic memory impairments. This would unable AD patients to access images and thus would affect their capacity to monitor their plan of action. Indeed, our work reveals that the cognitive system which is responsible for the goal management, also called the working self, is impaired in AD. Then, the failing working self would bring a pathological inhibitory control on patients cognition which would convey a better attention to principle of coherence than to principle of correspondence. In consequence, this process would distort conscious remembering processes of personal information, thus maintaining an out-of-date self which corresponds to the well-known symptom of anosognosia in dementia. Indeed, we have put to the fore that the treatment of affective information seems to cancel the control process of the working self, leading to a spontaneous recollective experience related to the related-to-the disease self...POITIERS-BU Droit Lettres (861942101) / SudocPOITIERS-MSHS (861942220) / SudocSudocFranceF

Les effets de la méditation de pleine conscience sur les symptômes cognitivo-émotionnels dans le trouble cognitif léger et la maladie d'Alzheimer : une revue de littérature narrative

International audienceAlzheimer’s disease is characterized by memory disorders and global cognitive decline, along with affective and behavioral symptoms. Considering drugs have limited effects, it seems necessary to use non-pharmacological interventions in order to reduce the symptoms of dementia. Mindfulness, which has positive effects on cognitive functioning and emotional state, would be a promising therapeutic option. The present narrative literature review examines the studies that tested the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions for people with, or at risk of, Alzheimer’s disease. The results indicate that mindfulness-based interventions reduce the cognitive symptoms (attention and memory deficits) as well as the emotional symptoms (depression and anxiety in particular) of dementia. However, those interventions need to be adapted to older adults.La maladie d'Alzheimer se manifeste par des troubles de la mémoire et un déclin cognitif plus général, le plus souvent associés à des troubles de l'humeur et du comportement. Les traitements médicamenteux ayant une efficacité assez modeste, il apparaît nécessaire de leur associer une prise en charge non pharmacologique. La méditation de pleine conscience, qui a des effets bénéfiques sur le fonctionnement cognitif et sur l'état émotionnel, semble être une piste intéressante. Cette revue de littérature narrative se propose de recenser les études ayant testé l'efficacité d'une intervention basée sur la pleine conscience auprès de personnes souffrant de la maladie d'Alzheimer ou à risque de développer cette maladie. Il apparaît que ces interventions présentent un intérêt pour réduire les symptômes cognitifs (troubles attentionnels et mnésiques notamment) et émotionnels (affects dépressifs et anxiété en particulier). Cependant, elles nécessitent un certain nombre de modifications pour être adaptées à ce public

Effortful memory processes under stereotype threat and self-concept in aging

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Self-referential processing in Alzheimer's disease: Two different ways of processing self-knowledge?

International audienceTwo previous studies showed that self-reference encoding had no effect on Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients' recollective experience when it was compared to other-reference encoding, whereas it did have an effect when it was compared to semantic processing, but only for emotional trait adjectives. In the present study, the performance of 22 AD patients was compared with that of 21 normal controls on a task involving recognition of emotional versus neutral adjective traits following self-reference versus other-reference encoding, using the remember/know/guess paradigm. Results showed that although AD patients had a positive explicit view of themselves, their self became salient for negative adjective traits only. We concluded that there might exist two ways of processing self-referential knowledge in human cognition: one explicit and the other more implicit

The memory deficit hypothesis of compulsive checking in OCD: what are we really talking about? A narrative review

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