Impaired knowledge of famous people and events with intact autobiographical memory in a case of progressive right temporal lobe degeneration: Implications for the organisation of remote memory

VH, a 71-year-old woman with a progressive deterioration of the right temporal lobe, was shown to be gravely impaired on tests of publicly acquired semantic information, including both visual and verbal knowledge of famous people and events. In contrast, autobiographical knowledge of personally relevant people and personal event memory appeared to be completely normal. Interestingly, some information was elicited regarding public events that impinged upon the patient's own life. This represents the first quantitative study of I:emote memory in a patient with right temporal lobe degeneration, and a pattern of remote memory loss that has not been previously reported. We argue that VH's preserved autobiographical memory performance does not imply the presence of specialised subsystems dedicated to autobiographical versus nonautobiographical material. Instead, we propose a "supporting activation" account of retrieval from remote memory. Autobiographical memory consists of distributed representations involving multiple types of information. During a retrieval attempt, supporting activation from intact regions may assist VH's retrieval of autobiographically relevant material from her damaged right temporal lobe.