Implausible future events in a confabulating patient with an anterior communicating artery aneurysm

Abstract

Patient MW, a known confabulator, and healthy age-matched controls produced past and future events. Events were judged on emotional valence and plausibility characteristics. No differences in valence were found between MW and controls, although a positive emotional bias toward the future was observed. Strikingly, MW produced confabulations about future events that were significantly more implausible than those produced by healthy controls whereas MW and healthy controls produced past events comparable in plausibility. A neurocognitive explanation is offered based on differences between remembering and imagining. Possible implications of this single case in relation to confabulation and mental time travel are discussed.

Keywords:

• Confabulation
• Episodic future thinking
• Mental time travel
• Autobiographical memory
• Episodic memory
• Imagined events

The authors wish to thank Martin A. Conway for providing invaluable guidance on this case study and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We would also like to thank the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust for their assistance, a registered charity that provides community-based rehabilitation for adults with brain injury. We extend our gratitude to MW and his wife for all their encouraging help in this research.

Notes

1. ¹No control data is available for comparison.

2. ²It is noteworthy that the positivity bias could have been due to the more advanced age of MW and the control participants. However, to our knowledge, the future positivity bias has only been investigated in young healthy adults (e.g. Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008; Newby-Clark & Ross, 2003). Therefore to answer the question of whether this particular bias exists in older age requires further empirical investigation, possibly comparing the bias in young and old participants.