Is retrograde amnesia associated with an ability to know who we are and imagine what we will be like in the future? To answer this question, we had S.G., a patient with focal retrograde amnesia following hypoxia, two brain-damaged (control) patients with no retrograde memory deficits, and healthy controls judge whether each of a series of trait adjectives was descriptive of their present self, future self, another person, and that person in the future, and later recognize studied traits among distractors. Healthy controls and control patients were more accurate in recognizing self-related compared to other-related traits, a phenomenon known as the self-reference effect (SRE). This held for both present and future self-views. By contrast, no evidence of (present or future) SRE was observed in SG, who concomitantly showed reduced certainty about his personality traits. These findings indicate that retrograde amnesia can weaken the self-schema and preclude its instantiation during self-related processing.

逆行性遗忘症是否与了解我们是谁并想象我们未来会是什么样子的能力有关？为了回答这个问题，我们让 SG（一名缺氧后出现局灶性逆行性遗忘症的患者）、两名无逆行性记忆缺陷的脑损伤（对照）患者和健康对照者判断一系列特征形容词中的每一个是否描述了他们现在的自我、未来的自己、另一个人、以及未来的那个人，然后在干扰因素中识别出所研究的特征。与其他相关特征相比，健康对照组和对照患者在识别自我相关特征方面更准确，这种现象称为自我参照效应（SRE）。这对于现在和未来的自我观点都成立。相比之下，在 SG 中没有观察到（现在或将来）SRE 的证据，同时他对自己的人格特质的确定性也降低了。这些发现表明，逆行性遗忘会削弱自我图式，并在自我相关处理过程中阻止其实例化。