Prof. Kopelman will discuss commonalities, controversies, and outstanding issues around episodic memory and associated disorders.

'Episodic memory in humans alludes to personal recollection of past episodes and incidents, such that we can ‘travel back mentally in time’. In clinical disorders, it can be affected in a variety of ways. This presentation will highlight examples from human amnesia, illustrated by clinical case-examples and video-clips, and it will review current explanatory theories. My own work suggested that the key neuropsychological deficit in anterograde amnesia is in ‘acquisition’, rather than in forgetting, although forgetting is accelerated on recall tasks 10-20 minutes following stimulus acquisition. Others have pointed to accelerated forgetting over longer delays, particularly in certain forms of epilepsy. Marr (1971) and McClelland et al (1995) suggested two routes to learning, and a case-study suggested preserved ‘slow cortical’ learning in a severely amnesic patient. Retrograde amnesia (RA) is a fascinating phenomenon, referring to loss of memories for autobiographical episodes and/or personal semantic facts which occurred before the onset of a brain disease or injury. The severity of RA is only loosely associated with the severity of anterograde amnesia, suggesting different underlying mechanisms.

There are various theories of how and why RA occurs, but they all have their limitations. Spontaneous confabulation refers to the unprovoked outpouring of erroneous memories, seen in some neurological patients, now thought to relate to damage in the ventro-medial and orbito-frontal regions of the frontal lobes. A recent study will be presented which tested between alternative theories of confabulation, finding damage to autobiographical memory and executive systems to be most critical to the ‘rise and fall’ of confabulation.'

This talk will be of particular interest to academic and research professionals who are interested in the subject area.