Post anoxia impairment of autobiographical memory and time estimation

A case of episodic amnesia with impairment of time perception is described; it illustrates the link between time perception and autobiographical memory. This woman suffered from a Sheehan syndrome with anoxia at the age of 36 and since that date has had a strong and isolated difficulty to estimate the date and duration of events in a range of weeks, months or years. Conversely, short duration time spans are correctly evaluated. The patient's complaints also involve episodic memory. She reports many events from her biography very imprecisely while the semantic autobiographical data are preserved. The patient has difficulty in recalling the date of public events and the period of celebrity of well-known people. That observation confirms the specificity of time organization for long periods and the link with the episodic memory where the context of the dating task is crucial. The results are discussed in reference to autobiographical memory that involves mental wandering in time-space and the constitution of self over a time continuum. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.