Valentina La Corte

Paris Descartes, CPSC | Paris 5 · Institut de Psychologie

Vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) at resting-state has been associated to cognitive functions dependent on cognitive control, such as memory. However, little is known about the phasic interaction between cognitive and autonomic control. In a pre-registered within-between-subject designed experiment, the potential of vmHRV biofeedback...

Unawareness of memory deficits is an early manifestation in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), which often delays diagnosis. This intriguing behavior constitutes a form of anosognosia, whose neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. We hypothesized that anosognosia may depend on a critical synaptic failure in the error-monitoring system, which...

Time is at the core of the concept of memory, since memory is a skill that allows us to maintain over short to long timespans the possibility of retrieving in the present information perceived in the past and past experiences. Dated memories ground our sense of identity, temporal continuity, and self-awareness. This chapter presents specific types...

Unawareness of memory deficits is an early manifestation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This intriguing behavior constitutes a form of anosognosia and has neural mechanisms that remain largely unknown. Here, we hypothesized that it may result from a failure in the error-monitoring system, which would prevent AD patients from being aware...

Mindfulness attracted increased research interests in the last decade, reporting an overall beneficial effect of this practice on cognitive performances. Nevertheless, recently a possible detrimental impact of mindfulness has been underlined. While the effect of mindfulness on memory remains under-explored, recent studies have observed an increased...

Mental time travel to personal past and future events shows remarkable cognitive and neural similarities. Both temporalities seem to rely on the same core network involving episodic binding and monitoring processes. However, it is still unclear in what way the temporal distance of the simulated events modulates the recruitment of this network when...

Anosognosia, or the lack of awareness of one's own impairment, is frequent for memory deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Although often related to frontal dysfunctions, the neural mechanisms of anosognosia remain largely unknown. We hypothesized that anosognosia in AD may result from a failure in the error-monitoring system, thus p...

Background Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients are often unaware of their memory deficits even at early stage of disease. Anosognosia has been related to frontal dysfunction although its underlying neural mechanism is still unknown. We hypothesized that it may result from an inability to monitor ongoing behavior due to a failure in the error‐monitori...

The recall of factual and contextual information and its related binding is a core characteristic of episodic memory sensitive to aging effects. Context and binding may also be significantly involved in the production of false memories. The innovative aim of the present study was to assess in a naturalistic context the quantity and quality of corre...

Patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) suffer from various types of memory distortions. We showed that confabulations are plausible memories, mainly reflecting the recall of repeated personal events mistakenly considered by confabulating patients as specific and unique events. The aim of this study is to see whether the notion that over-learned inf...

Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to execute planned actions, and episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to imagine future personal events, are two core aspects of future-oriented cognition. The present study aimed for the first time at examining the role of semantic memory loss in PM and EFT in a single case patient (SL) at the...

Nous souhaitons valider un nouveau programme Serious Games de stimulation cognitive sur tablette tactile visant la mémoire (épisodique, prospective, visuospatiale) et l'apprentissage de procédures d'optimisation de l'encodage (traitement exécutif et attentionnel, imagerie mentale, référence à soi, motivation). Merci de diffuser cette annonce aux pe...

Using virtual reality, we implemented a naturalistic variant of the DRM paradigm in young and older adults to evaluate false recall and false recognition. We distinguished false recognition related to the highest semantic association (the critical lures), semantic similarity (i.e. items that belong to the same semantic category), and perceptual sim...

Background While memory performance is well studied in preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD), there are relatively few studies concerning memory errors. However, in the clinical and prodromal stages, intrusions are very frequent, and the specific error profile appears to be particularly diacritical compared to other diseases. In this study, we explo...

Background Lack of awareness of cognitive decline (ACD) is common in late-stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Recent studies showed that ACD can also be reduced in the early stages. Methods We described different trends of evolution of ACD over 3 years in a cohort of memory-complainers and their association to amyloid burden and brain metabolism. We s...

False memories refer to falsely remembering something that did not happen or that happened differently. The effects of age on episodic memory underlie both the decline in real memories and the increase in false memories. But, what is the richness and what is the feeling of reality of false memories in the elderly? This mini-review on false memory i...

False memories refer to falsely remembering something that did not happen or that happened differently. The effects of age on episodic memory underlie both the decline in real memories and the increase in false memories. But, what is the richness and what is the feeling of reality of false memories in the elderly? This mini-review on false memory i...

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology is found in the brain years before symptoms are usually detected. An episodic memory (EM) decline is considered to be the specific cognitive sign indicating a transition from the preclinical to the prodromal stage of AD. However, there is still no consensus on the most sensitive tool to detect it. Ob...

Introduction: The longitudinal trajectories of functional brain dynamics and the impact of genetic risk factors in individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease are poorly understood. Methods: In a large-scale monocentric cohort of 224 amyloid stratified individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease, default mode network (DMN) resting state function...

In Alzheimer's disease (AD), the progressive atrophy leads to aberrant network reconfigurations both at structural and functional levels. In such network reorganization, the core and peripheral nodes appear to be crucial for the prediction of clinical outcome because of their ability to influence large-scale functional integration. However, the rol...

An extensive psychological literature shows that sleep actively promotes human episodic memory (EM) consolidation in younger adults. However, evidence for the benefit of sleep for EM consolidation in aging is still elusive. In addition, most of the previous studies used EM assessments that are very different from everyday life conditions and are fa...

Life expectancy is constantly increasing in developed countries. Unfortunately, a longer life does not always correspond to a healthier life, as even normal aging is associated with cognitive decline and increased risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases. Episodic memory (EM) is one of the most vulnerable cognitive functions in aging, and its de...

The ability to modulate our emotional experience, depending on our current goal and context, is of critical importance for adaptive behavior. This ability encompasses various emotion regulation strategies, such as fictional reappraisal, at stake whenever engaging into fictional works (e.g., movies, books, video games or virtual environments). Neuro...

In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the progressive atrophy leads to aberrant network reconfigurations both at structural and functional levels. In such network reorganization, the core and peripheral nodes appear to be crucial for the prediction of clinical outcome due to their ability to influence large-scale functional integration. However, the role of...

Introduction Observational multimodal neuroimaging studies indicate sex differences in Alzheimer's disease pathophysiological markers. Methods Positron emission tomography brain amyloid load, neurodegeneration (hippocampus and basal forebrain volumes adjusted to total intracranial volume, cortical thickness, and 2-deoxy-2-[fluorine-18]fluoro-D-glu...

Introduction: Several neurodegenerative brain proteinopathies, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), are associated with cerebral deposition of insoluble aggregates of α-synuclein. Previous studies reported a trend toward increased cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) α-synuclein (α-syn) concentrations in AD compared with other neurodegenerative diseases and h...

Introduction: Cognitive change in people at risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) such as subjective memory complainers is highly variable across individuals. Methods: We used latent class growth modeling to identify distinct classes of nonlinear trajectories of cognitive change over 2 years follow-up from 265 subjective memory complainers individual...

Introduction: The free and cued selective reminding test is used to identify memory deficits in mild cognitive impairment and demented patients. It allows assessing three processes: encoding, storage, and recollection of verbal episodic memory. Methods: We investigated the neural correlates of these three memory processes in a large cohort study...

The objective of this work is to devise and validate a sensitive and specific test for confabulatory impairment. We conceived a screening test for confabulation, the Confabulation Screen (CS), a brief test using 10 questions of episodic memory (EM), where confabulators most frequently confabulate. It was postulated that the CS would predict confabu...

Confabulation is an unusual sign in neurological and in neuropsychological pathologies. In this article we present an objective neuropsychological instrument, the Confabulation Battery (CB), which allows the quantifying and qualifying of different types of confabulations. The CB was administered to French and Italian normal participants. Data from...

Background: Improved understanding is needed of risk factors and markers of disease progression in preclinical Alzheimer's disease. We assessed associations between brain β-amyloidosis and various cognitive and neuroimaging parameters with progression of cognitive decline in individuals with preclinical Alzheimer's disease. Methods: The INSIGHT-...

Episodic memory is the memory of personally lived events located in time and space, it shapes our identity and allows us to project ourselves into the past and the future. This form of memory is vulnerable to the effects of age and its alteration, hindering the autonomy of the subjects, can predict the evolution towards neurodegenerative disorders....

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to form, maintain and execute intended actions after a delay, in the appropriate context in the future (Einstein et al. 2005). The realization of intentions consists in remembering that something has to be done in the future, remembering the exact action to be executed (retrospective component) and the context...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) causes alterations of brain network structure and function. The latter consists of connectivity changes between oscillatory processes at different frequency channels. We proposed a multi-layer network approach to analyze multiple-frequency brain networks inferred from magnetoencephalographic recordings during resting-states...

Objective Confabulations are described as “a falsification of memory occurring in clear consciousness in association with an organically derived amnesia”. We describe production of confabulations in long-term memory in a 51-year-old woman who do not present amnesic syndrome typically associated. The patient was admitted in reanimation unit for sept...

Normal aging is related to a decline in specific cognitive processes, in particular in executive functions and memory. In recent years a growing number of studies have focused on changes in brain functional connectivity related to cognitive aging. A common finding is the decreased connectivity within multiple resting state networks, including the d...

In the last two decades, the study of memory processes has been expanded to encompass the processes involved in foreseeing events in the future dimension. The mental time travel is a mental ability, which allows individuals not only to go back in time but also to foresee specific future events (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997). The ability to projec...

Recent advances in network science has allowed new insights in the brain organization from a system perspective. Characterizing connectivity maps, estimated from neuroimaging data, as graphs of connected nodes has not only pointed out important network features of the physiological brain – such as small-worldness, modularity, and regional centralit...

Recollection is used to refer to the active process of setting up retrieval cues, evaluating the outcome, and systematically working toward a representation of a past experience that we find acceptable. In this study we report on three patients showing different patterns of confabulation affecting recollection and consciousness differentially. All...

Les recherches de cette dernière décennie témoignent de l’intérêt croissant pour la capacité de l’individu à se projeter dans le futur et à imaginer/prévoir des évènements dans un futur personnel. Différentes théories ont été proposées pour essayer d’expliquer les mécanismes cognitifs sous-jacents à cette capacité. Dans cet article nous nous intére...

The ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience personal events is referred to as episodic future thinking. Different theories have been proposed to try to explain the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying episodic future thinking. In this paper we focus on studies concerning the episodic prospection capacity in cognitive aging and...

The clinical challenge in subjective memory decline (SMD) is to identify which individuals will present memory deficits. Since its early description from Babinsky, who coined the term 'anosognosia' (i.e., the lack of awareness of deficit), the awareness of cognitive impairment is crucial in clinical neuropsychology. We propose a cognitive model in...

Confabulation, the production of statements or actions that are unintentionally incongruous to the subject’s history, background, present and future situation, is a rather infrequent disorder with different aetiologies and anatomical lesions. Although they may differ in many ways, confabulations show major similarities. Their content, with some min...

Some patients with organic amnesia show confabulation, the production of statements and actions unintentionally incongruous to the subject's history, present and future situation. It has been shown that confabulators tend to report as unique and specific personal memories, events or actions that belong to their habits and routines (Habits Confabula...

Patients who confabulate have at least partially preserved hippocampus and make confabulatory errors in remembering their past, in orienting themselves in time and space, and in predicting their personal future. Conversely, complete bilateral hippocampal damage produces deep amnesia, temporo-spatial disorientation, and inability to predict the pers...

The relationship between episodic memory (EM) and semantic memory (SM) encompasses a major interest for understanding the functional architecture of the long-term memory and the mechanisms underlying the different types of memory deficits. Our main objective was to study the functionning of these two memory systems and their dysfunction, through th...

The relationship between episodic and semantic memory systems has long been debated. Some authors argue that episodic memory is contingent on semantic memory (Tulving 1984), while others postulate that both systems are independent since they can be selectively damaged (Squire 1987). The interaction between these memory systems is particularly impor...

Within the framework of Memory, Consciousness and Temporality Theory (MCTT) confabulation is not a ‘pure’ memory disorder, but rather a pathological condition that involves the Temporal Consciousness (TC), (i.e. being conscious of one's own past, present and future). According to the MCTT, TC remains unimpaired in confabulating patients, as it is i...

In this study we describe a patient, TA, who developed a chronic amnesic-confabulatory syndrome, following rupture of a right internal carotid siphon aneurysm. Our aim was to elucidate as fully as possible the nature of TA’s impairment and to test the hypothesis of confabulation as reflecting a dysfunction of Temporal Consciousness, i.e. to become...

Clinical and experimental observation have shown that patients who confabulate, especially but not exclusively when provoked by specific questions, retrieve personal habits, repeated events or over-learned information and mistake them for actually experienced, specific, unique events. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to characterize and quanti...

Normal aging is characterized by reduced performance on tasks of long-term memory. Older adults (OA) not only show reduced performance on tasks of recall and recognition memory, but also, compared to young adults (YA), are more vulnerable to memory distortions. In this study we describe the performance of a group of OA and a group of YA on the reca...

Priming effects on the identification process were examined in young and older adults by using event-related potentials (ERPs). Animals and artifacts were presented in an ascending sequence of filtered images, half of which had been shown in their complete versions in a previous study phase. Each stimulus was represented by a progressively less fil...

Memory is not a flawless system and distortions of memories can be found among its troubles. This phenomenon observed in several pathologies can lead to the production of confabulations and false recognitions. The present article proposes a review of the studies that addressed memory distortions in order to better understand their origin, mechanism...