Personal semantics: Is it distinct from episodic and semantic memory? An electrophysiological study of memory for autobiographical facts and repeated events in honor of Shlomo Bentin

Renoult, Louis; Tanguay, Annick; Beaudry, Myriam; Tavakoli, Paniz; Rabipour, Sheida; Campbell, Kenneth B.; Moscovitch, Morris; Levine, Brian; Davidson, Patrick S. R.

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.08.013

Cited by 77 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 130 publications

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“…These results are perhaps most similar to the ones obtained in the Renoult et al (2015b) study, which found no differences in N400 amplitude to names of famous people associated with high and low levels of personal memories. Instead, the amount of personal episodic memories linked to a name modulated the later-occurring LPC, which is often associated with explicit recollection of contextual details (for reviews, see Rugg and Curran (2007) and Voss and Paller (2008)).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Indeed, our results replicate previous studies, described in the introduction, that have found greater P300/LPC responses to self-relevant information. Based on the results from Renoult et al’s (2015b) study, one possible interpretation of our data is that participants may be retrieving personal episodic memories associated with their personal preferences. Given these findings, a relevant question is the extent to which access to information about personal preferences involves the retrieval of both acontextual and episodic components.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…In particular, we focus on a subset of what has sometimes been termed “self-knowledge”, which includes a range of self-evaluative judgments about preferences, personal characteristics, and identity. The term personal semantics has also been applied to other types of knowledge, such as autobiographical facts (e.g., “My brother’s name is Brian.”) or repeated events (e.g., “I pick up my brother from school every day.”), which may rely on a distinct set of neural networks (see Renoult et al (2015b)). Among types of personal semantics, self-knowledge has been argued to be most likely to be distinct from either general semantics or episodic memory (for reviews, see Renoult et al (2012) and Grilli and Verfaellie (2014)).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The N400 reveals how personal semantics is processed: Insights into the nature and organization of self-knowledge

Coronel

Federmeier

2016

Neuropsychologia

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There is growing recognition that some important forms of long-term memory are difficult to classify into one of the well-studied memory subtypes. One example is personal semantics. Like the episodes that are stored as part of one’s autobiography, personal semantics is linked to an individual, yet, like general semantic memory, it is detached from a specific encoding context. Access to general semantics elicits an electrophysiological response known as the N400, which has been characterized across three decades of research; surprisingly, this response has not been fully examined in the context of personal semantics. In this study, we assessed responses to congruent and incongruent statements about people’s own, personal preferences. We found that access to personal preferences elicited N400 responses, with congruency effects that were similar in latency and distribution to those for general semantic statements elicited from the same participants. These results suggest that the processing of personal and general semantics share important functional and neurobiological features.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The N400 reveals how personal semantics is processed: Insights into the nature and organization of self-knowledge

Coronel

Federmeier

2016

Neuropsychologia

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“…However, there is reason to believe that concepts with personal significance engage more than just the semantic memory system. Recent work suggests that these concepts may be more similar to episodic memory than general semantic memory (for a review, see Renoult, Davidson, Palombo, Moscovitch, & Levine, 2012), in that autobiographically significant concepts automatically activate related episodes in memory (Westmacott, Black, Freedman, & Moscovitch, 2004; Westmacott & Moscovitch, 2003) and evoke a neural signature more similar to episodic than semantic memory (Renoult et al, 2015, 2016). Thus, the current effects could be partly or entirely driven by episodic memory, with the names of familiar places activating related details of past episodes, including people who were there, in a relatively automatic (and potentially subconscious) manner.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming, not inhibition, of related concepts during future imagining

Campbell

Benoit

Schacter

2017

Memory

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Remembering the past and imagining the future both involve the retrieval of details stored in episodic memory and rely on the same core network of brain regions. Given these parallels, one might expect similar component processes to be involved in remembering and imagining. While a strong case can be made for the role of inhibition in memory retrieval, few studies have examined whether inhibition is also necessary for future imagining and results to-date have been mixed. In the current study, we test whether related concepts are inhibited during future imagining using a modified priming approach. Participants first generated a list of familiar places and for each place, the people they most strongly associate with it. A week later, participants imagined future events involving recombinations of people and places, immediately followed by a speeded response task in which participants made familiarity decisions about people’s names. Across two experiments, our results suggest that related concepts are not inhibited during future imagining, but rather are automatically primed. These results fit with recent work showing that autobiographically significant concepts (e.g., friends’ names) are more episodic than semantic in nature, automatically activating related details in memory and potentially fueling the flexible simulation of future events.

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“…However, these two forms of memory are interdependent [48,49]. In particular, Renoult et al [49] introduced personal semantics (PS) memory. PS concerns knowledge of one's past and, like EM, PS is a personal feature (i.e.…”

Section: Episodic and Emotional Memory Binding (A) The Role Of Emotiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical dynamics of informational patterns and decision-making

Varona

Rabinovich

2016

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Traditional studies on the interaction of cognitive functions in healthy and disordered brains have used the analyses of the connectivity of several specialized brain networks-the functional connectome. However, emerging evidence suggests that both brain networks and functional spontaneous brain-wide network communication are intrinsically dynamic. In the light of studies investigating the cooperation between different cognitive functions, we consider here the dynamics of hierarchical networks in cognitive space. We show, using an example of behavioural decision-making based on sequential episodic memory, how the description of metastable pattern dynamics underlying basic cognitive processes helps to understand and predict complex processes like sequential episodic memory recall and competition among decision strategies. The mathematical images of the discussed phenomena in the phase space of the corresponding cognitive model are hierarchical heteroclinic networks. One of the most important features of such networks is the robustness of their dynamics. Different kinds of instabilities of these dynamics can be related to 'dynamical signatures' of creativity and different psychiatric disorders. The suggested approach can also be useful for the understanding of the dynamical processes that are the basis of consciousness.

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Personal semantics: Is it distinct from episodic and semantic memory? An electrophysiological study of memory for autobiographical facts and repeated events in honor of Shlomo Bentin

Cited by 77 publications

References 130 publications

The N400 reveals how personal semantics is processed: Insights into the nature and organization of self-knowledge

The N400 reveals how personal semantics is processed: Insights into the nature and organization of self-knowledge

Priming, not inhibition, of related concepts during future imagining

Hierarchical dynamics of informational patterns and decision-making

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