Amnésia global transitória e memória de reconhecimento emocional

Abstract

Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) is a syndrome that temporarily impairs the formation of new memories (anterograde amnesia), with preservation of other cognitive abilities. The objective of the present study was to investigate whether TGA interferes with the recognition of emotional stimuli (negative, neutral and positive). To this end, the recognition and response criteria of these patients were evaluated during the ictus phase in an experiment that had two phases: study phase and test phase, and which was applied to patients with TGA (n = 20) and to healthy control subjects (n = 20), matched by sex, age and education. In the coding phase, participants viewed and assessed the emotional valence of the images, while in the test phase, the coded images were re-presented among new images, and participants judged which images had been previously presented (i.e., recognition) and confidence in each response. Participants also underwent an assessment of global cognitive efficiency, episodic memory test, semantic fluency test and digit span test. The TGA group performed lower than the control group in episodic memory, working memory, and MMSE tasks. The analysis of discriminability (d) revealed that the control group showed greater discrimination between old and new stimuli than the AGT group, while the analysis of the response criterion (C) demonstrated that the TGA group produced a significantly more conservative bias than the control group, being more reluctant to classify stimuli as previously seen Conclusion: These results reinforce that TGA primarily affects episodic memory and the discrimination of emotional stimuli, while other cognitive abilities can be preserved.