Total recall: Detecting autobiographical memory retrieval in the absence of behaviour.
Neuropsychologia May 3, 2025 Matthew Kolisnyk, Geoffrey Laforge, Marie-Ève Gagnon et al.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate autobiographical memory in a single patient with a disorder of consciousness (DoC). The patient viewed video clips from their own recent mall visit, a control's visit to the same mall, and a novel bookstore. A machine-learning classifier trained on twelve healthy participants decoded the patient's brain activity, distinguishing the three conditions with balanced accuracy of 0.448 (p = .032) and distinguishing the patient's own clips from the control's clips with balanced accuracy of 0.609 (p = .032), both within the control group's performance range. These results suggest that autobiographical memory processes may remain intact in some DoC patients despite their inability to report them.