The effect of hippocampal damage in children on recalling the past and imagining new experiences
Open accessAbstract
Compared to adults, relatively little is known about autobiographical memory and the ability to imagine fictitious and future scenarios in school-aged children, despite the importance of these functions for development and subsequent independent living. Even less is understood about the effect of early hippocampal damage on children's memory and imagination abilities. To bridge this gap, we devised a novel naturalistic autobiographical memory task that enabled us to formally assess the memory for recent autobiographical experiences in healthy school-aged children. Contemporaneous with the autobiographical memories being formed, the children also imagined and described fictitious scenarios. Having established the performance of healthy school-aged children on these tasks, we proceeded to make comparisons with children (n=21) who had experienced neonatal hypoxia/ischaemia, and consequent bilateral hippocampal damage. Our results showed that healthy children could recall autobiographical events, including spatiotemporal information and specific episodic details. By contrast, children who had experienced neonatal hypoxia/ischaemia had impaired recall, with the specific details of episodes being lost. Despite this significant memory deficit they were able to construct fictitious scenarios. This is in clear contrast to adults with hippocampal damage, who typically have impaired autobiographical memory and deficits in the construction of fictitious and future scenarios. We speculate that the paediatric patients' relatively intact semantic memory and/or some functionality in their residual hippocampi may underpin their scene construction ability.
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Developmental amnesics with hippocampal damage demonstrate intact construction of imagined experiences despite significant deficits in autobiographical memory.
“Moreover, a series of studies on developmental amnesics with hippocampal damage reported that these patients demonstrated intact construction of imagined experiences despite experiencing significant deficits in autobiographical memory (Maguire et al., 2010b;Cooper et al., 2011;Hurley et al., 2011).”
From Considering the role of semantic memory in episodic future thinking: evidence from semantic dementia (2012) · cites this paper as Cooper et al., 2011
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- Authors
- Cooper, J. M., Vargha-Khadem, F., Gadian, D. G., & Maguire, E. A.
- Affiliations
- University College London (GB)
- Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Maguire, Eleanor A.
- ORCID
- Maguire, Eleanor A.
- Venue
- Neuropsychologia
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2011-06
- Volume
- 49
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 1843-1850
- ISSN
- 0028-3932 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3112497
- OpenAlex
- W1965297013
- Cited by
- 116
- References
- 57
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 16
- FWCI
- 7.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Neuropsychologia (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Wellcome Trust (EAM)
- MRC programme (G0300117)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Identity, Memory, and Therapy
- Keywords
- hippocampal lesions, autobiographical memory, children, episodic memory, scene construction, mental imagery, future scenarios, spatiotemporal memory, semantic memory
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Amnesia, Hypoxia, Brain, Child, Cues, Female, Hippocampus, Humans, Imagination, Infant, Newborn, Intelligence Tests, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Memory, Neuropsychological Tests, Psychomotor Performance, Mental Recall, Space Perception
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