Relationships Between Confabulations and Mental Time Travel in Alzheimer’s Disease

The authors assessed the relationship between confabulations in Alzheimer’s disease and the ability to mentally travel in time to reexperience memories. Twenty-seven patients with Alzheimer’s disease were administered evaluations of provoked confabulations, spontaneous confabulations, and mental time travel. Provoked and spontaneous confabulations were evaluated with questions probing personal and general knowledge and with a scale rated by nursing and medical staff. Mental time travel was assessed by asking patients to retrieve personal memories. After each memory, participants had to provide a “remember” response if they were able to retrieve the event with their encoding context or a “know” response if they knew that the event had occurred but were unable to recall any contextual details. Results showed significant negative correlations between confabulations and “remember” responses. These findings reflect a relationship between the occurrence of confabulations in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and impairments in their ability to mentally project themselves in time when retrieving the context in which confabulated memories were originally encoded.