Overgeneral autobiographical memory in Parkinson's disease

Autobiographical memory (AM) concerns the ability to remember past events from one's own life and consists of autobiographical knowledge (personal facts) and autobiographical incidents (personal events). The novelty of this research was to assess both personal factual and personal event AM in Parkinson's disease (PD) for specified lifetime periods. An autobiographical fluency task was used in which participants were asked to recall personal events and personal facts from five separate lifetime periods. Previous findings as well the brain regions affected in PD lead to the hypothesis that Parkinson's patients would recall less autobiographical memories especially for the most recent lifetime periods. Sixteen non-demented and non-depressed Parkinson's patients and sixteen age-education-matched controls participated. The results showed a temporal gradient for the recall of personal events in Parkinson's patients as they recalled fewer events for recent time periods. The PD group also had more difficulties in recalling autobiographical events rather than an autobiographical knowledge. The difficulty in recalling autobiographical events was characterized by overgenerality, with PD patients failing to generate specific episodic memories.