Recollection of previously experienced events is a key element of human memory that entails recovery of spatial, perceptual, and mental state details. While deficits in this capacity in association with brain disease have serious functional consequences, little is known about individual differences in autobiographical memory (AM) in healthy individuals. Recently, healthy adults with highly superior autobiographical capacities have been identified (e.g., LePort, A.K., Mattfeld, A.T., Dickinson-Anson, H., Fallon, J.H., Stark, C.E., Kruggel, F., McGaugh, J.L., 2012. Behavioral and neuroanatomical investigation of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). Neurobiol. Learn. Mem. 98(1), 78-92. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2012.05.002). Here we report data from three healthy, high functioning adults with the reverse pattern: lifelong severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) with otherwise preserved cognitive function. Their self-reported selective inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first-person perspective was corroborated by absence of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) biomarkers associated with naturalistic and laboratory episodic recollection, as well as by behavioral evidence of impaired episodic retrieval, particularly for visual information. Yet learning and memory were otherwise intact, as long as these tasks could be accomplished by non-episodic processes. Thus these individuals function normally in day-to-day life, even though their past is experienced in the absence of recollection.

Autobiographical memory in major depression has been characterized as overgeneralized, with patients recalling few episodic details, prioritizing general schematic events. However, whether this effect reflects impaired episodic or semantic memory, or domain-general cognitive processes, is unknown. We used the Autobiographical Interview (Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, & Moscovitch, 2002) to derive episodic and semantic contributions to autobiographical memory in patients with severe major depression. We also assessed memory for public events and famous people. Depressed patients were impaired on episodic, but not semantic, autobiographical memory from 2 weeks to 10 years before testing. They were also impaired on memory for public events, possibly because they followed the news less than controls. Patients' memory for famous names was not impaired, although this was strongly associated with non-episodic memories to a greater degree than in controls. The findings suggest a specific impairment of episodic autobiographical memory in depression that is not fully accounted for by domain-general processes involved in strategic retrieval.

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Under naturalistic drinking conditions, alcohol's effects on memory depend on task, memory process, and limb of the BAC curve. The differential effects of alcohol on retrieval during the ascending and descending limbs demonstrate the importance of examining the differential effects on the two limbs.

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