A calendar savant with episodic memory impairments |
| |
Authors: | Ingrid R Olson Marian E Berryhill David B Drowos Lawrence Brown Anjan Chatterjee |
| |
Institution: | 1. Department of Psychology , Temple University , Philadelphia, PA, USA iolson@temple.edu;3. Department of Psychology , Temple University , Philadelphia, PA, USA;4. Center for Cognitive Neuroscience , Philadelphia, PA, USA;5. Department of Psychology , Temple University , Philadelphia, PA, USA;6. Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania , Philadelphia, PA, USA;7. Center for Cognitive Neuroscience , Philadelphia, PA, USA;8. Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania , PA, USA |
| |
Abstract: | Patients with memory disorders have severely restricted learning and memory. For instance, patients with anterograde amnesia can learn motor procedures and retain some restricted ability to learn new words and factual information. However, such learning is inflexible and frequently inaccessible to conscious awareness. Here we present a case of patient AC596, a 25-year-old male with severe episodic memory impairments, presumably due to anoxia during a preterm birth. In contrast to his poor episodic memory, he exhibits savant-like memory for calendar information that can be flexibly accessed by day, month, and year cues. He also has the ability to recollect the exact date of a wide range of personal experiences over the past 20 years. The patient appears to supplement his generally poor episodic memory by using memorized calendar information as a retrieval cue for autobiographical events. These findings indicate that islands of preserved memory functioning, such as a highly developed semantic memory system, can exist in individuals with severely impaired episodic memory systems. In this particular case, our patient's memory for dates far outstripped that of normal individuals and served as a keen retrieval cue, allowing him to access information that was otherwise unavailable. |
| |
Keywords: | Memory Amnesia Autobiographical memory Savant Compensation Dates Calendars |
|
|