Design This is a cross-sectional study involving quantitative measures and qualitative interviews. Participants Sixteen brain injured men and four brain injured women participated. Eighteen of these had a close relative who also took part. Measures In addition to being interviewed, brain injured participants completed questionnaires on mood symptoms and fatigue, and a speed of information processing task. Relatives of brain injured people were interviewed and completed the symptom checklist. Correlational analysis was applied to the quantitative measures and- qualitative analysis was informed by the grounded theory approach. Results Quantitative measures suggest significant association of subjective perception of fatigue severity with mood and brain injury related symptoms. Relatives' objective perceptions of brain injured relatives' symptoms correlated significantly with subjective views. Subjective perception of fatigue did not correlate significantly with severity of brain injury or information processing speed. Qualitative analysis identified fatigue as a major problem for some people. Descriptions noting the impact of fatigue following injury included increased slowness, decreased energy, and lack of control. Fatigue was commonly considered to be more mental than physical, and was often linked with short temper. Conclusions Findings suggest that fatigue was related less to severity of injury than to psychological and emotional factors. The multidimensional nature of fatigue was confirmed. Links were made with low-mood, anxiety, lack of motivation, boredom, and having to cope with 'normal life' following brain injury. The possibility that 'fatigue' is an umbrella term used by some to describe a range of symptoms following brain injury was considered.

Co-speech gesture is ubiquitous in everyday conversation, facilitating comprehension, learning, and memory. Information is often provided uniquely in the gesture modality and this information is integrated with speech, affecting the listener’s comprehension and memory of a message. Despite the robust evidence that gesture supports learning, the memory mechanisms that support this learning are unclear. The current study investigates the ability of patients with hippocampal damage to integrate and retain information from co-speech gesture. Four patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions, four patients with damage to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and 17 healthy comparisons watched videos of a storyteller narrating four stories with gestures. Some of the gestures provided redundant information to the speech signal and some provided supplementary information that was unique. The participants retold the story immediately after, thirty-minutes after, and four weeks later. Co-speech gesture integration was measured by the proportion of words changed as a result of seeing a supplementary gesture. Memory retention for the stories was measured by the number of story features mentioned during each retelling. The patients with hippocampal amnesia were successful at integrating speech and gesture information immediately after hearing the story but did not show a benefit in memory for gestured features after delays. Though the hippocampus has previously been thought to be critical for relational memory, this finding suggests that the integration of speech and gesture may be mediated by other cognitive mechanisms.

The loss of memory can have a profound and disabling effect on individuals. People who acquire memory impairments are often unable to live independent lives because they cannot remember what they need to do. In many cases, they rely on family members who live with them. When I carried out ethnographic fieldwork to explore this domain, I observed that individuals with amnesia were surrounded by family members who provided extensive memory support (e.g. reminders). I found that such families very worked closely together to accomplish everyday activities, such as coordinating a family outing or planning a doctor’s appointment. However, these activities were often undermined by family members forgetting. This led me to view memory aids as collaboration technology, rather than as tools that only support an individual’s memory. My dissertation explores this idea and how it can lead to more appropriate designs of assistive technology. To design collaborative assistive technology, I involved persons with amnesia and their family members in a process of participatory design. The design team included six individuals with amnesia, two neuropsychologists, and myself. Five family members were also involved in later stages. This team envisioned the design of a shared calendar application, called Family-Link, that I implemented for Palm mobile devices. I evaluated Family-Link by comparing it to the commercially available Palm Calendar in a six-month study with four families. I found that participants had significantly more shared events when using Family-Link than when using Palm Calendar. Qualitative evidence suggests that Family-Link increased all participants’ awareness of other family members’ schedules, provided caregivers with a greater a sense of security by enabling them to track their family member with amnesia, and reduced the amount of effort that caregivers needed to coordinate. Family-Link also fulfilled the individual needs of persons with amnesia by providing an information storage and retrieval mechanism. However, persons with amnesia and caregivers differed in their opinions about which features were useful. Family-Link can be a particularly important tool for families where members are not co-located throughout the day.

The loss of memory can have a profound and disabling effect on individuals. People who acquire memory impairments are often unable to live independent lives because they cannot remember what they need to do. In many cases, they rely on family members who live with them. When I carried out ethnographic fieldwork to explore this domain, I observed that individuals with amnesia were surrounded by family members who provided extensive memory support (e.g. reminders). I found that such families very worked closely together to accomplish everyday activities, such as coordinating a family outing or planning a doctor’s appointment. However, these activities were often undermined by family members forgetting. This led me to view memory aids as collaboration technology, rather than as tools that only support an individual’s memory. My dissertation explores this idea and how it can lead to more appropriate designs of assistive technology. To design collaborative assistive technology, I involved persons with amnesia and their family members in a process of participatory design. The design team included six individuals with amnesia, two neuropsychologists, and myself. Five family members were also involved in later stages. This team envisioned the design of a shared calendar application, called Family-Link, that I implemented for Palm mobile devices. I evaluated Family-Link by comparing it to the commercially available Palm Calendar in a six-month study with four families. I found that participants had significantly more shared events when using Family-Link than when using Palm Calendar. Qualitative evidence suggests that Family-Link increased all participants’ awareness of other family members’ schedules, provided caregivers with a greater a sense of security by enabling them to track their family member with amnesia, and reduced the amount of effort that caregivers needed to coordinate. Family-Link also fulfilled the individual needs of persons with amnesia by providing an information storage and retrieval mechanism. However, persons with amnesia and caregivers differed in their opinions about which features were useful. Family-Link can be a particularly important tool for families where members are not co-located throughout the day.

By the term “Cultural Amnesia” I refer to a diagnosis of a condition that has been caused by external damage or trauma. This may result in a society forced to forget about their roots, culture and connection to the landscape, once been embraced by a community as a whole but now been forgotten and replaced by different ideals that are displaced from context.  It is an assumption that something is missing or is about to be forgotten, that would have disastrous consequences. The causes of the amnesia need to be diagnosed and identified and their possible effects imagined. The term “Culture” here can refers simply to the way how have been done and developed in a specific context from the beginning of times. Cultural amnesia, then, would be the widespread ignorance of and indifference to what used to be important but has now fallen into forced displacement, resulting in a possible “dystopian future”.  The aim of the research is to analyse the recent developments in Norrland and the Sápmi areas that are largely affected by capitalist space production. It highlights also the story of displacement and injustice the Sámi have suffered. There has been an exploitation of the Sámi rights by the government and evidence of the Swedish state land theft from the Sámi. The real repression began with the modernization of society, where the causes lay in factors like the need for forest, agricultural efficiency and new definitions of land ownership. Today the indigenous people find themselves fighting a battle against the state and multinational mining companies, while their land, cultural heritage and their way of life is at stake.  Can we imagine a cure, a plan of care or an antidote to Cultural Amnesia?

Two amnesic patients with MTL damage that included the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex were tested along controls on a series of “oddity” discrimination tasks, in which they had to select an odd item from a visual array. Participants’ eye moments were monitored while they performed these tasks. Three types of stimuli were used: greebles, scenes, and faces. Results revealed that patients were impaired on tasks that required them to discriminate between items that shared features in common and tasks that required processing items from different viewpoints. An analysis of their eye movements revealed that their impaired performance was linked with decreased viewing times of target items compared to controls, when discriminating between greebles and scenes; their poor performance on the faces task could not be explained by the same token.

Two amnesic patients with MTL damage that included the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex were tested along controls on a series of “oddity” discrimination tasks, in which they had to select an odd item from a visual array. Participants’ eye moments were monitored while they performed these tasks. Three types of stimuli were used: greebles, scenes, and faces. Results revealed that patients were impaired on tasks that required them to discriminate between items that shared features in common and tasks that required processing items from different viewpoints. An analysis of their eye movements revealed that their impaired performance was linked with decreased viewing times of target items compared to controls, when discriminating between greebles and scenes; their poor performance on the faces task could not be explained by the same token.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-92). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Our memory is prone to distortions which in everyday life can lead to mistaken memories. This thesis investigates memory distortion. In addition, one might recall (e.g. an event) correctly but misremember the source of the event (e.g. place or time of the event); this particular type of memory distortion is called source amnesia. Here, an overview of cognitive theories of memory distortion as well as the neuroscience behind memory distortion is provided. In addition, the particular memory distortion of source amnesia where one is unable to acquire when or where a fact was learned is further investigated. Results indicate that an overlap of qualities related to the information being learned causes information to be linked to wrong sources, thus creating distorted memories. Misinformation is also indicated to produce impairment in memory. In memory distortions, memory impairments are representative in various areas of the brain, including the hippocampus and the amygdala in the medial temporal lobes as well as in the frontal cortex and in the visual cortex. These key areas are also closely related to brain aging in Alzheimer´s disease and in schizophrenia, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and in drug and alcohol abuse. Individuals inflicted with these disease symptoms seem to be more prone to source amnesia compared to controls. The limitations and future directions of what we can study regarding memory distortion and source amnesia are also presented in this thesis.

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências Biológicas. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Farmacologia. / Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-19T09:04:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0Bitstream added on 2014-09-25T22:12:46Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 183508.pdf: 5773999 bytes, checksum: f865d19bfab88fc2da0c933006380b92 (MD5) / A doença de Parkinson (DP) é um distúrbio neurodegenativo caracterizada pelo aparecimento de alterações motoras e comprometimento das funções cognitivas. A base neuroquímica da DP, está associada à degeneração de neurônios dopaminérgicos (DAérgicos) nigroestriatais e conseqüente redução dos níveis estriatais de dopamina (DA). Fenômenos semelhantes podem ser observados em modelos animais da DP, utilizando uma neurotoxina seletiva para os neurônios DAérgicos - 1-metil-4-fenil-1,2,3,6-tetrahidropiridina (MPTP). O presente estudo teve como objetivos avaliar os efeitos comportamentais e neuroquímicos da administração de MPTP na substância negra compacta (SNc) de ratos, avaliados em um teste de aprendizagem e memória - esquiva ativa de duas vias . Além disso, verificar se o tratamento com de L-DOPA/ benserazida, ou cafeína reverte o prejuízo cognitivo observado neste animais. Os resultados demonstraram que a lesão induzida pelo MPTP reduziu os níveis estriatais de DA e seus metabólitos e prejudicou os processos de aquisição e retenção, necessários para execução do teste de esquiva ativa de duas vias. O tratamento com L-DOPA/benserazida, promoveu a reposição dos níveis estriatais de DA, mas não reverteu o déficit cognitivo dos ratos lesados com MPTP e ainda prejudicou o desempenho dos animais controles neste teste. Por outro lado, a cafeína em doses baixas melhorou os escores de aprendizagem e memória envolvidos neste modelo. Estes dados demostram que este procedimento experimental parece ser efetivo como um modelo animal para o estudo de déficits cognitivos observados nos estágios iniciais da DP. Ressaltam ainda a importância do sistema DAérgico nigroestriatal e sua interação com o sistema adenosinérgico, em processos de aprendizagem e memória, afetados em pacientes parkinsonianos.