title: The Proactive Self in Space: How Egocentric and Allocentric Spatial Impairments Contribute to Anosognosia in Alzheimer's Disease.
abstract: In addition to impairments in episodic and spatial memory, anosognosia (i.e., loss of awareness of the deficient aspect of own cognitive functioning) may be considered an important cognitive marker of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, although a growing body of interesting models have been proposed to explain this early symptom, what is still missing is a unifying framework of all the characteristic signs occurring in patients with AD that may guide the search for its causal neuropathological process and, ultimately, the etiological process. This contribution will first show how anosognosia may be related to the above-mentioned episodic and spatial memory impairment through a unifying framework of all these characteristic signs, i.e., the continuous interaction between different spatial representations. Second, we hypothesize that a break in the interaction between different spatial representations, as we suggest occurs in AD, may contribute significantly both to the early impairments in spatial and episodic memory, and to a deficient self-awareness since it may interfere with the capacity of the brain to detect predictive errors.
authors: Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Lab, Milan, Italy.|Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Department of Psychology, Milan, Italy.
authors: Silvia
authors: S
authors: Serino
authors: Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Lab, Milan, Italy.|Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Department of Psychology, Milan, Italy.
authors: Giuseppe
authors: G
authors: Riva
mesh_terms: D000377:Agnosia / Q000209:etiology*; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications*; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests
keywords: Allocentric reference frame; Alzheimer’s disease; anosognosia; egocentric reference frame; episodic memory