Living in the moment: patients with MTL amnesia can richly describe the present despite deficits in past and future thought.

Accumulating evidence suggests that amnesic patients have difficulty imagining the future in addition to having deficits remembering the past (see Verfaellie et al., 2012). In a recent article in this journal, Zeman et al. (in press) reported that amnesics are also impaired at describing the present: A group of amnesics with mixed etiologies and variable neurocognitive profiles produced fewer narrative elements compared to controls when describing pictures and real-life settings. These results were taken as evidence that amnesics’ impoverished descriptions of the past and future reflect a more basic impairment in narrative construction, the experience of the present, or cognitive functions outside the memory domain. By contrast, a study by Race et al. (2011) suggested that impaired description of pictures in the present is not a general characteristic of amnesia. Patients with amnesia due to medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage and cognitive impairments limited to thememory domain produced picture-based stories as well as controls despite deficits in describing the past and future. Zeman et al. argue that important differences in task demands (e.g., the requirement to describe versus tell a story about picture elements) “hampers direct comparison of the results” across studies, suggesting that picture narrative deficits in amnesia may depend on specific task demands. We investigated this hypothesis by retesting the same MTL amnesics and controls from the Race et al. (2011) study on a picture description task, using instructions similar to Zeman et al. (in press). 2. Methods