Mohamad El Haj

Nantes Université | UNIV Nantes

Objectives: This study examined the role of caregivers' perception of cognitive impairment in burden of family caregivers in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We hypothesized that the evaluation of cognitive impairment by family caregivers plays a pivotal role in burden. Methods: The study included 110 dyads (person with AD and their caregiver) recruite...

In this study, we offer a comprehensive assessment of the phenomenological experience of patients with behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) upon retrieval of autobiographical memory. We invited patients with bvFTD and control participants to retrieve autobiographical memories and rate, for each memory, its phenomenological characteris...

Introduction: We investigated the degree of cognitive insight in patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) regarding their hallucinations, aiming to elucidate the subjective experiences and perceptions associated with this phenomenon. Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, we invited both AD patients (n = 31) and their informants to evaluate the...

We assessed the aesthetic experience of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) to understand their ability to experience feelings of the sublime and to be moved when viewing paintings. We exposed patients with bvFTD and control participants to concrete and abstract paintings and asked them how moved they were by these pain...

Research has suggested that near future events are typically viewed from a first-person (an own-eyes, also known as field) perspective while distant future events are typically viewed from a third-person (an observer) perspective. We investigated whether these distinct mental perspectives would be accompanied by distinct eye movement activities. We...

The junction between memory dysfunction and socioaffective dysfunction is a complex area as research has typically been interested in one dysfunction rather than in the other. However, this junction can be studied under the lens of destination memory. Destination memory (i.e. the ability to remember to whom a piece of information was previously tra...

Unlabelled: Impairment of cognitive functions is the primary reason for admission to long-term care units, with executive functions playing a pivotal role in dependency and behavioral issues. These functions pose significant challenges to nursing staff in providing care. However, the assessment of executive functions in elderly individuals residin...

Objectives Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) has been associated with autobiographical overgenerality (i.e., a tendency of patients to retrieve general rather than specific personal memories). AD has also been associated with hallucinations. We investigated the relationship between autobiographical overgenerality and hallucinations in AD. Methods We invite...

Background Future thinking and prospective memory are two cognitive processes oriented toward the future and reliant on the ability to envision oneself in future scenarios. Objective We explored the connection between future thinking and prospective memory in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods We invited both AD participants and c...

While prospective memory (i.e., the ability to execute a future plan) has been extensively researched, little is known about negative prospective memory (i.e., the ability to remember not to execute a future plan) in Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS). We thus evaluated both prospective memory and negative prospective memory in KS, as well as the relationsh...

Financial decision‐making requires trading off between guaranteed and probabilistic outcomes and between immediate and delayed ones. While research has demonstrated that patients with behavioural‐variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) prefer immediate rewards at the expense of future ones (i.e. temporal discounting), little is known about how pati...

The continuum between involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu, as proposed by Barzykowski and Moulin, can be better defined by considering research on autobiographical retrieval in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Although autobiographical retrieval in patients with Alzheimer's disease can generally be associated with a sense of familia...

We asked 44 French and 42 Lebanese participants with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) who lived in their own homes to rate their depression and anxiety during the late fall/early winter 2020 lockdown and compared their responses. We also asked caregivers to quantify the frequency of visits that participants received from family members during the lockdown....

Background: While affective disturbances are a key symptomatic indicator of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), little is known about how patients process the emotional load of their autobiographical (i.e. personal) memories. Methods: We assessed the interplay of emotional regulation and autobiographical memory by inviting 18 bv...

Destination memory, which is the ability to remember to whom one has sent information, is intimately associated with social cognition. We assessed whether processing attributes of destinations would improve destination memory in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). In this cross-sectional study, we tested the destination memory of 24 patient...

Pupil dilation is considered an index of cognitive effort, as the pupil typically dilates as the cognitive load increases. In this paper, we evaluated whether older adults demonstrate increased pupil size when performing tasks requiring cognitive inhibition. We invited 44 older and 44 younger adults to perform the Stroop task while their pupil dila...

Introduction Cryptocurrency investment and trading are rapidly growing activities due to the development of applications and platforms that offer fast, continuous, and easy entry into the cryptocurrency world. To understand decision making in cryptocurrency holders, we assessed temporal discounting, that is, whether Bitcoin holders disregard reward...

Background: Self-imagination refers to a mnemonic strategy of imagining oneself at a scene related to a cue. Objective: We tested the effect of self-imagination on memory recall in Alzheimer's disease (AD) Method: Individuals with AD and healthy controls were invited to perform two conditions. In the control (i.e., semantic elaboration) conditio...

To provide a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of autobiographical memory, WIREs Cognitive Science is launching a special issue gathering contributions from various perspectives in the field of autobiographical memory. To introduce this special issue, I outline the philosophy of this collaborative project and summarize the knowledg...

While research has shown a distrusted sense of the self in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), little is known about how patients describe their self-image. We used the "Who am I?" task to invite patients with bvFTD and control participants to produce statements beginning with "I am…." We distinguished between statemen...

Background When making decisions, one often faces a trade-off between immediate and long-term rewards. In these situations, people may prefer immediate over later rewards, even if immediate rewards are smaller than later ones; a phenomenon known as temporal discounting. In this study, we, for the first time, assessed temporal discounting in three p...

Background: The hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and fusiform gyrus are brain areas that deteriorate during early-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD). The ApoE4 allele has been identified as a risk factor for AD development, is linked to an increase in the aggregation of amyloid ß (Aß) plaques in the brain, and is responsible for atrophy of the hippocam...

While research has consistently demonstrated how autobiographical memory triggers visual exploration, prior studies did not investigate gender differences in this domain. We thus compared eye movement between women and men while performing an autobiographical retrieval task. We invited 35 women and 35 men to retrieve autobiographical memories while...

Background Associative inference refers to an adaptive ability that allows flexible recombination of information acquired during previous experiences to make new connections that they have not directly experienced. This cognitive ability has been widely associated with the hippocampus. Aims We investigated associative inference in patients with Al...

We investigated destination memory, defined as the ability to remember to whom a piece of information was previously transmitted, for emotional destinations (i.e., a happy or sad person) in Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS). We asked patients with KS and control participants to tell facts to neutral, positive, or negative faces. On a subsequent recognition...

Within the field of memory research, studies on destination memory (e.g., the ability to remember to whom information was previously told) show how it is closely associated with social cognition. The present review thus summarizes the literature on destination memory and demonstrates how it involves social interaction. It offers a comprehensive pic...

In everyday life, autobiographical memories are revisited silently (i.e., covert recall) or shared with others (i.e., overt recall), yet most research regarding eye movements and autobiographical recall has focused on overt recall. With that in mind, the aim of the current study was to evaluate eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical...

Flashbulb memories are autobiographical memories for important and emotional events, which have the particularity of being at the intersection of personal and public events. Autobiographical memory impairments are highly prevalent in schizophrenia, a psychiatric condition intrinsically linked to self-disorders. Thus, we aimed to evaluate flashbulb...

Objective: Little research has investigated decision making in patients with Korsakoff syndrome (KS). Specifically, to our knowledge, there is a lack of research investigating whether patients with KS may tend to prefer immediate over future rewards (i.e., temporal discounting). Further, we investigated the relationship between temporal discountin...

Background Within the concept of the self, a distinction can be made between ideal self (i.e., what would like to become) and feared self (i.e., what would not like to become in the future). Objective We investigated ideal self and feared self in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We have also measured these self-related processes in rel...

Background Verbal fluency tasks are widely used to assess cognitive and linguistic abilities in older adults. In this study, we investigated whether pupillometry can be used to measure verbal fluency in healthy older adults. Methods We invited 45 older adults (Mean age = 66.55 years, SD = 4.32) to perform a verbal fluency task, which involves gene...

Destination memory, the ability to remember to whom information was previously delivered, has found to be influenced by social processing and social interactions. This memory has also been shown to be compromised in normal aging. Our paper investigated whether older adults would demonstrate better destination memory for self-related information tha...

We evaluated the relationship between eye movements and future thinking. More specifically, we evaluated whether maintained fixation could influence cognitive characteristics of future thinking. We invited participants to imagine future events in two conditions: while freely exploring a white wall and while fixating a cross on the wall. Results dem...

The decline of autobiographical memory in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is mainly characterized by overgenerality. While there is a large body of research on autobiographical overgenerality in AD, this research has mainly assessed retrieval with a dichotomy between specific vs. general retrieval. To go beyond this dichotomy, we assessed several degrees...

Background The objective of this study was twofold. We assessed whether individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) demonstrate higher empathy toward people with the same disorder. We also assessed whether empathy may enhance the recognition of these peoples’ faces. Method Twenty-seven mild AD participants and 30 healthy older adults were invited to...

Background While event-based prospective memory refers to enacting intending action in response to a specific event or cue (“e.g., When I tell you there are 10 minutes left, please give me this stopwatch”), time-based prospective memory refers to enacting intending action in relation to a specific time (“In 10 minutes time, please ask me for a penc...

The aim of this study was to explore in a hospital setting the relationships between work motivation and stress among psychologists working in hospitals. The second aim was to identify the respective roles of threat appraisal and challenge appraisal in this population. We expected work stress to have a motivational impact in the workplace, with pri...

We assessed how Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients would imagine their self in the future. AD patients and healthy controls were asked to generate statements beginning with “I-will-be” to describe how they saw themselves or how they wished to be in the future. These statements were analyzed in terms of four self-dimensions, i.e., physical self, soci...

We investigated whether pupil size can variate with the intensity of cognitive processing in patients with behavioral-variant-Frontotemporal-Dementia (bvFTD). We invited five bvFTD participants and 21 controls to perform forward spans and backward spans, and, in a control condition, to count aloud. We recorded pupil activity using eye-tracking-glas...

Background and aims Autobiographical memory serves to recall past personal experiences and share them with others, promoting social bonding and communication. In this study, we investigated whether encouraging patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to share autobiographical memories during formal neuropsychological testing may boost the patient–cli...

Background Nursing home staff have been adversely impacted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, facing difficulties in providing patient care. The aim of this study was to explore health workers’ perception regarding their own care quality experience in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the second wave of the pandemic, we investigated...

Objective: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers, especially those employed in hospital settings, have been exposed to a variety of stressors in the workplace. The aim of this study was to explore the Emotional Exhaustion (EE) of workers in geriatric facilities during the COVID-19 crisis. We accordingly sought to investigate...

Background: There is a recent interest in pupil dilation during the retrieval of autobiographical memory. We pursued this line of research by measuring pupil diameter during the retrieval of self-defining memories, that is, memories that are highly vivid, emotionally intense, and are retrieved to reflect enduring concerns in a person's life. Meth...

While memory errors and forgetting occur in everyone’s daily life, they are much more prevalent in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Patients and their family members are constantly affected by memory errors and their consequences. While some may be benign (e.g., forgetting a word in the middle of a conversation), others seriously affect social in...

While visiting and socialization restrictions during lockdowns were instituted to cope with the Covid-19 spread and to prolong the life of residents of retirement homes, these measures could have been expected to decrease the quality of life of their residents. We assessed longitudinal effects of the two successive lockdowns, as implemented in Fran...

Points essentiels Le dépistage et le diagnostic précoce de la maladie d’Alzheimer (MA) permettent d’optimiser la prise en charge des patients et de minimiser les coûts en santé publique. Les sociétés savantes et les associations de patients insistent sur les bénéfices de l’annonce de MA mais, en pratique, près de la moitié des patients n’auraient p...

This study aimed to examine the false memories in individuals with stabilized schizophrenia. Using the Deese, Roediger, and McDermott (DRM) task, schizophrenia patients and matched healthy controls had to recall words from each DRM list. Following the presentation of the DRM lists, the participants performed a recognition task. Neuropsychological t...

Background Visual perspective during memory retrieval has mainly been evaluated with methodologies based on introspection and subjective reports. The current study investigates whether visual perspective can be evaluated with a physiological measurement: pupil dilation.Methods While their pupil diameter was measured with an eye-tracker, forty-five...

Background: Diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD) can cause substantial psychological distress in patients. We thus assessed how patients with AD remember the announcement of diagnosis. Methods: We recruited 47 participants with mild AD (26 women; M age=68.89 y, SD=7.37; M years of formal education=9.74, SD=3.00). We invited the participants to re...

Objective: We investigated intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Method: We invited AD patients and control participants to construct real events as well as fabricated events describing fictitious personal events that occurred in the past. Results: Results demonstrated slower retrieval time for intenti...

It is well established that pupil activity indexes cognitive processing. For instance, research has consistently demonstrated that the pupil reacts to working memory span task performance. However, little is known about pupil reaction to cognitive processing in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). We thus investigated whether span tasks can modulate pupil siz...

Recent research has assessed pupil size during past thinking in patients with retrograde amnesia. Building on this research, we assessed pupil size during future thinking in a retrograde amnesia patient. To this end, we measured pupil size during past and future thinking in L, a 19-year-old, right-handed man free of neurological/psychiatric disorde...

Objective: To understand awareness and fluctuations of awareness in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), it is fruitful to consider the objects of awareness, e.g., cognitive functioning or recognition of the disease, as well as the mechanisms and modes of expression underlying awareness. With a holistic and discourse-centered approach, we aimed to identify di...

A common question in the neuropsychological testing of patients with Alzheimer’s Disease is whether or not patients should be tested in the presence of their spouses. We addressed this issue by assessing the neuropsychological performances of Alzheimer’s Disease patients in the presence or absence of spouses. Results showed no significant differenc...

Untreated depression in dementia is associated with increased mortality, accelerated cognitive decline, earlier nursing home placement, and decreased quality of life. Thus it is important to accurately measure and treat depression in dementia. This chapter summarizes, discusses, and compares the several existing scales that measure depression in Al...

This article discusses psychological and clinical studies of depression as comorbid to different dementias and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). First, we summarize studies on the diagnosis and prevalence of depression in dementia patients; we will show that there are different ways of diagnosing depression in dementia, leading to some conflicting f...

The pupil size is not only influenced by light, but also by cognitive effort and research has consistently demonstrated how pupil size can index cognitive effort in nonpathological population. We thus offer an original case study in which we evaluate whether pupil dilation can index cognitive processing in a patient with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). W...

La ricerca che questo contributo si propone di riassumere poggia sul lungo lavoro svolto dal Laboratorio di epistemologia e pratiche dell'educazione dell'Università degli Studi di Napoli (LEPE) dove si è prestata particolare attenzione alla comprensione e alla stimolazione della memoria implicita in soggetti anziani sia in condizioni normali che pa...

We investigated the effects of lockdown, as implemented by retirement homes to cope with the spread of Covid-19, on hallucinatory experiences in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The study included 47 patients with AD living in retirement homes and who were already experiencing hallucinations prior to the lockdown. We invited caregivers to ra...

This article investigates the effect of emotion on destination memory. Participants were asked to tell neutral, positive, and negative information to neutral, positive, and negative faces. Afterward, participants were asked to remember to whom each piece of information was previously told. Results demonstrated high destination memory when the posit...

We assessed the effect of repeated recall on item memory and source monitoring in Alzheimer's disease (AD). AD patients and controls were instructed to either look at or imagine items. They then had to either retrieve the items without indicating their source in three consecutive free recall tests, or to remember the source of the retrieved items i...

The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis proposes that human musicality has evolved as mechanisms supporting social bonding. We consider the MSB hypothesis under the lens of amnesia by arguing how patients with amnesia, especially those with Alzheimer's disease, can benefit from music, not only to retrieve personal memories, but also to use th...

Objective Because memory decline is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), an important endeavor for both clinicians and researchers is to improve memory performances in AD. This can be pursued by olfactory stimulation of memory in patients with AD and by studying the effects of olfactory stimulation on autobiographical memory (i.e., memory for...

There is an increased interest in the study of eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical memories. Following this trend, the aim of the current study was to evaluate eye movements during the retrieval of remote and recent autobiographical memories. We instructed 71 participants to retrieve memories of personal events from early childho...

Background: In a previous study, we assessed burnout in geriatric healthcare workers during the first lockdown that lasted from March to May 2020 in France, in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Objective: We carried out a follow-up study to assess burnout in the same population during the second lockdown that was implemented at the end of October...

Self-defining memories (i.e., memories of self-relevant events) were found to be hampered by Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). We therefore investigated whether this decline can be alleviated with odor exposure. We invited individuals with mild AD and healthy controls to choose a preferred odor and to retrieve three autobiographical memories after exposure...

In their effort to prevent the spread of infections, retirement homes have been forced to limit physical interaction between residents and the outside world and to drastically reduce their residents’ activities, decisions which are likely to increase loneliness in residents. To investigate this issue, we evaluated loneliness in patients with Alzhei...

BACKGROUND In a previous study, we assessed burnout in geriatric healthcare workers during the first lockdown that lasted from March to May 2020 in France, in response to the Covid-19 crisis. OBJECTIVE We carried out a follow-up study to assess burnout in the same population during the second lockdown that was implemented at the end of October 202...

Background: There is bourgeoning interest in how older adults remember their falls and research in this area has demonstrated how falls can reshape memory retrieval in older adults. We pursued this line of research by assessing whether older adults succeed in integrating memories of falls into their life story. Methods: We invited older adults to r...

Destination memory involves remembering to whom we told information. Low accuracy of this memory is linked to higher self‐focus and lower attentional resources allocated to the recipient of the information. The present paper aimed to investigate whether the existence of distinctive features (e.g., tattoos) of destination face would improve destinat...

We assessed depression in 72 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) who live in retirement homes during the COVID-19-related lockdown. We invited caregivers of 72 patients with AD who live in retirement homes to rate depression in the patients both before and during the lockdown. Analysis demonstrated increased depression in the patients during the...

Mind-wandering refers to the intentional and unintentional tendency to withdraw from the external environment and engage in internally generated thoughts. We investigated intentional and unintentional mind-wandering in patients with Korsakoff syndrome (KS). We invited 31 patients with KS and 33 control participants to answer a questionnaire probing...

Autobiographical memory (AM) (i.e., memory for personal information) is a unique form of memory that goes beyond recalling information such as what, where and when of an event, to include what that event means and why it is important to our life story. This paper therefore reviews the available literature on AM in Korsakoff syndrome (KS). It summar...

The own-age bias refers to the observation that face recognition is typically superior for own-age faces compared with other-age faces. We investigated this bias in Korsakoff patients, as well as its relationship with social contact and episodic memory. Korsakoff patients and age-matched controls were exposed to older faces (own-age faces) and youn...

We investigate whether retrograde-amnesia can be indexed with pupil activity. We present the case of L, 19-year-old, without neurological or psychiatric disorders except for retrograde-amnesia. We invited L to retrieve retrograde and anterograde memories while his pupil size was monitering with eye-tracking glasses. Results demonstrated impaired re...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is associated with an impairment of autobiographical memories, leading to the production of nonspecific memories. Recent research has demonstrated that odor can serve as a powerful cue for the retrieval of autobiographical memories in AD. Moreover, studies conducted in young adults have showed that odor-evoked autobiographi...

We evaluated relationship between personality and memory for social interactions. More specifically, we investigated the relationship between extraversion and the ability to remember who told us some information (i.e., source memory) and the ability to remember to whom we told that information (i.e., destination memory). On a source memory task, pa...

There has been a surge in social cognition and social neurosciences research comparing laboratory and real eye movements. Eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical memories (i.e., personal memories) in laboratory situations are also receiving more attention. We compared eye movements during the retrieval of autobiographical memories us...

Introduction: In this exploratory study, we investigated gender differences regarding autobiographical memory in KS. Method: We invited 33 patients with KS and 35 matched control participants to retrieve autobiographical memories and, afterward, to rate mental time travel during retrieval, emotional value and importance of memories. Results: A...

Future thinking, which is the ability to project oneself forward in time to pre-experience an event, is intimately associated with emotions. We investigated whether emotional future thinking can activate emotional facial expressions. We invited 43 participants to imagine future scenarios, cued by the words "happy", "sad", and "city". Future thinkin...