Abstract EN:

Episodic memory deficits are almost always the first cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). They often alert people around the patient at first sight. Consequences of such troubles in the AD patient’s daily life become a decisive factor when the question of the institutionalization appears. The aim of this study was first to give a cognitive and affective interpretation of the episodic impairments through the examination of the relationship between memory and self. In overall, our results confirm that AD patients experience specific difficulty accessing autonoetic consciousness, that is to say mentally bring back events of the past, whereas noetic consciousness remains well-preserved, at least until a moderate stage of the disease Those difficulties with autonoetic consciousness could explain some typical episodic memory impairments. This would unable AD patients to access images and thus would affect their capacity to monitor their plan of action. Indeed, our work reveals that the cognitive system which is responsible for the goal management, also called the working self, is impaired in AD. Then, the failing working self would bring a pathological inhibitory control on patients’ cognition which would convey a better attention to principle of coherence than to principle of correspondence. In consequence, this process would distort conscious remembering processes of personal information, thus maintaining an out-of-date self which corresponds to the well-known symptom of anosognosia in dementia. Indeed, we have put to the fore that the treatment of affective information seems to cancel the control process of the working self, leading to a spontaneous recollective experience related to the related-to-the disease self. . .