A reversal of the temporal gradient for famous person knowledge in semantic dementia: implications for the neural organisation of long term memory

On tests of autobiographical memory, patients with semantic dementia demonstrate significantly better retrieval of episodic events from the recent past compared with the distant past. This reversal of the Ribot effect has been attributed to the relative sparing of the hippocampal complex in the disorder. Current computational models of long-term memory predict a similar time-dependent pattern of impairment on tests of remote semantic memory. Five patients with semantic dementia were tested on recognition (familiarity) and identification (knowledge) of famous names selected from four different time-periods: 1950's, 1980's, 1990-1993 (early 1990's) and 1994-1996 (current). As expected, it was found that one patient DM (who had focal left temporal lobe atrophy) showed no significant impairment on recognition of famous names, but was significantly better at producing information about people who were currently famous compared to people famous in the other three time-periods. The other four patients (who had bilateral temporal lobe damage) showed better recognition of famous names from the current time-period (and to a lesser extent the 1950's), yet were profoundly impaired on the identification component, producing very little information across all four time-periods. The results are discussed with respect to current views of the neural organisation of person-specific and general semantic memory. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.