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Mechanism of disorientation: reality filtering versus content monitoring.
Journal article

Mechanism of disorientation: reality filtering versus content monitoring.

  • 2013-09-10
Published in:
  • Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior. - 2013
Disorientation
Extinction
False memory
Orbitofrontal cortex
Post-traumatic amnesia
Strategic retrieval account
Adult
Aged
Amnesia
Confusion
Data Interpretation, Statistical
Female
Humans
Learning
Male
Memory
Mental Recall
Middle Aged
Neuropsychological Tests
Orientation
Perception
Psychomotor Performance
Trail Making Test
Verbal Behavior
English Disorientation is frequent after brain damage. It is a constituent component of post-traumatic amnesia and was part of the original definition of the Korsakoff syndrome, together with amnesia and confabulations. Orbitofrontal reality filtering is a pre-conscious memory control process that has been held accountable for disorientation and a specific type of confabulations that patients act upon. A recent study questioned the specificity of this process and suggested that confabulating patients who failed in orbitofrontal reality filtering similarly failed to monitor the precise content of memories, a critical step within the strategic retrieval account, which describes a series of processes leading up to the recollection of memories. In the present study we combined the proposed experimental requirements of both processes in a single continuous recognition task and tested a group of 21 patients with a matched deficit of delayed free recall. We found that only deficient reality filtering, but not content monitoring, significantly correlated with disorientation and distinguished between confabulators and non-confabulators. Thus, reality confusion, as evident in disorientation and behaviourally spontaneous confabulation, primarily reflects an inability to monitor memories' relation with ongoing reality rather than to monitor their precise content.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/245947
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