LOUIS PASTEUR UNIVERSITY STRASBOURG I

Ekaterina Denkova

Description

Niveau: Supérieur, Doctorat, Bac+8

• dissertation

LOUIS PASTEUR UNIVERSITY - STRASBOURG I Ecole Doctorale des Sciences de la Vie et de la Santé Discipline : Sciences médicales Spécialité : Neuropsychologie DOCTORAL DISSERTATION Prepared by Ekaterina DENKOVA Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg THE NEURAL BASES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY: HOW PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS INTERACT WITH EMOTION AND INFLUENCE SEMANTIC MEMORY Presented on Monday 25th September 2006 Examining Committee: Mme Lilianne MANNING (Supervisor) Mme Marie-Noëlle METZ-LUTZ (Louis Pasteur University Reporter) M. Hans MARKOWITSCH (External Reporter) M. Xavier SERON (External Reporter) M. Christian SCHEIBER (Reader)

• very grateful


• subjects who


• who gave


• famille d'accueil en france'


• ecole doctorale des sciences de la vie et de la santé


• external reporter

Sujets

• Dissertation
• Louis Pasteur University
• Scheiber
• Manning
• Pasteur

Informations

• Publié par: profil-feym-2012
• Nombre de lectures: 48
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

LOUIS PASTEUR UNIVERSITY - STRASBOURG I
Ecole Doctorale des Sciences de la Vie et de la Santé
Discipline : Sciences médicales
Spécialité : Neuropsychologie
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Prepared by Ekaterina DENKOVA
Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University Louis Pasteur of
Strasbourg
THE NEURAL BASES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY:
HOW PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS INTERACT WITH
EMOTION AND INFLUENCE SEMANTIC MEMORY
Presented on Monday 25th September 2006
Examining Committee:
Mme Lilianne MANNING (Supervisor)
Mme Marie-Noëlle METZ-LUTZ (Louis Pasteur University Reporter)
M. Hans MARKOWITSCH (External Reporter)
M. Xavier SERON (External Reporter)
M. Christian SCHEIBER (Reader)

LOUIS PASTEUR UNIVERSITY - STRASBOURG I
Ecole Doctorale des Sciences de la Vie et de la Santé
Discipline : Sciences médicales
Spécialité : Neuropsychologie
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Prepared by Ekaterina DENKOVA
Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University Louis Pasteur of
Strasbourg
THE NEURAL BASES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY:
HOW PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS INTERACT WITH
EMOTION AND INFLUENCE SEMANTIC MEMORY
Presented on Monday 25th September 2006
Examining Committee:
Mme Lilianne MANNING (Supervisor)
Mme Marie-Noëlle METZ-LUTZ (Louis Pasteur University Reporter)
M. Hans MARKOWITSCH (External Reporter)
M. Xavier SERON (External Reporter)
M. Christian SCHEIBER (Reader)

TO MY PARENTS,
MY BROTHER AND MY HUSBAND
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
First of all, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Lilianne Manning,
for everything: for the exceptional scientific quality of her supervision, for endless support,
for fruitful discussions, for enthusiasm and invariably warm attitude towards this research,
for opening to me the way of cognitive neuropsychology thinking, for encouraging me to
precise writing. Thank you very much; it was an honour and a pleasure to be your PhD
student.
I owe the official reviewers of this thesis, Dr Marie-Noëlle Metz-Lutz, Prof Dr Hans
Markowitsch, Prof Xavier Seron and Dr Christian Scheiber for their constructive
comments, suggestions and questions.
I wish to thank warmly the members of the Cognitive Neuropsychology team: Virginie,
Emilie, Christine. Specifically, many thanks to Anne for fruitful teamwork, for sharing
both success and drawbacks with me and also for being a close unforgettable friend; and to
Olivier for relevant advices and amazing relation.
I am very grateful to the previous as well as to the present directors of the Cognitive and
Behavioural Neurosciences Laboratory, Prof Bruno Will and Dr Christian Kelche, for
agreeable research environment. Thanks also to all members of this laboratory, it has a
pleasure to be in contact with you.
I am thankful to the director of Laboratory of Neuroimaging in vivo, Dr Daniel Grucker
who gave me the opportunity to accomplish the fMRI experiments in his institute.
Moreover, many thanks to Corinne for excellent technical assistance and joyful company,
and to Nathalie for admistrative assistance. Helene and Mario are also warmly thanked.
I thank the director, Dr Alain Muzet, and all members of the Centre of Applied Physiology,
where I spend the last year of my doctoral thesis.
I am very grateful to James Day for English revision of this manuscript.
I would like to thank very much the subjects who participated in this study and to their
relatives for the cooperation. JR and RF are sincerely thanked.
I am deeply grateful to my parents Siyka and Jivko for their endless love, for providing me
a happy childhood and for the trust in my throughout my live. Further thanks to my little
brother Nikolay for laugh and joyful moments. Thanks to my grand father Nikola who has
encourage me in all my projects.
I wand to thank warmly my parents-in-law, Ganka and Nino for their support and
encouragement.
I want to give my best thanks to Agathe, Arthur, Sylvie and Jean-Jacques Ringeisen (‘ma
famille d’accueil en France’) for all the pleasant moments.
Finally, I wish to thank warmly my husband Nikolay for strong and endless love, help and
support.
This work was supported by Cognitique-ACI (fMRI project) and the French Ministry of
Education and Research (ED’s grant).

ABSTRACT
The main aim of the present thesis has to help improving our understanding of neural
mechanisms underlying autobiographical memory (AbM), particularly how personal
recollections interact with emotion and influence semantic memory
Our first study investigated the neural correlates of spontaneous re-living of emotion
during recollection of personal event cued with personally known faces. Our findings
suggested that the use of highly self-relevant stimuli and the collection of data with no
previous refreshment of the memory trace (i) influenced the right lateralisation of the
activation in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and (ii) involved increased activity in the
cortical midline structures and subcortical circuits, known to sustain the self-generated
emotion, even though no emotion was explicitly acknowledged.
In our second study, the aforementioned nonverbal experiment was compared with a verbal
one involving pre-scanning testing in order to clarify whether the lateralisation issue of the
general network sustaining AbM retrieval. Our finding of a predominantly left-lateralized
cerebral network in both experiments suggested that left-sided pattern of brain activations
is associated with AbM retrieval per se in healthy subjects.
The third experimental work of the present thesis focused on the influence of
autobiographical significance on the semantic memory cerebral network. Our results
provided functional neuroimaging evidence that autobiographically significant semantic
knowledge relies on a pattern of brain activations different from that underlying ‘purely’
semantic knowledge, with the core difference being located at the MTL.
The last study investigated the neuronanatomical representations of both autobiographical
and semantic remote memory in two patients presenting with left temporal lobe epilepsy.
(i) We provided functional neuroimaging evidence of the dissociation within remote
memory (autobiographical vs semantic). (ii) Importantly, we documented dissociation
within semantic memory for famous people according to the nature of material. Our last
experimental work confirms the importance of combining neuropsychological and
neuroimaging methods in appropriate patients in order to better understand human memory
functions.
RESUME DETAILLE EN FRANÇAIS
La mémoire autobiographique rend possible l’encodage, le stockage et la récupération des
expériences propres à chaque individu (Tulving, 2002). Elle occupe une place importante
dans la cognition humaine puisqu’elle se situe au carrefour de l’identité personnelle, de
l’affectivité et de la conscience. Plus précisément, elle interagit étroitement avec l’émotion
et influence l’organisation et le stockage des connaissances sémantiques. La technique
d’imagerie par résonance magnétique fonctionnelle (IRMf), permet d’explorer in vivo les
régions cérébrales impliquées dans la mémoire autobiographique. Cependant, les travaux
qui visent la compréhension des mécanismes neuronaux sous-tendant ce système de
mémoire, sont encore peu nombreux. Généralement, ce travail de thèse a pour objectif
l’étude à l’aide de l’IRMf des régions cérébrales mises en jeu (i) lors de la récupération
spontanée de souvenirs émotionnels et (ii) lors de la récupération de concepts sémantiques
qui ont une signification autobiographique. Il comporte 4 volets de recherche.
(1) Notre première expérience en IRMf a pour objectif de comprendre comment l’émotion
influence le réseau cérébral sous-tendant la mémoire autobiographique. Il est généralement
accepté que les souvenirs autobiographiques et l’émotion sont étroitement liés. L’évocation
d’un événement personnel spécifique s’accompagne également du rappel de l’état affectif
qui est sans doute l’élément du souvenir le plus complexe. Très peu d’études en
neuroimagerie cérébrale ont à ce jour pris en compte le facteur émotion. (e.g., Markowitsch
et al., 2003; Piefke et al., 2003). Elles ont utilisé uniquement un matériel verbal et n’ont
pas apporté de conclusions consensuelles concernant le réseau cérébral qui sous-tend les
souvenirs autobiographiques émotionnels. En effet, il a été suggéré que les mots permettent
surtout de n