Nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir Valerio SANT-ANGELO (University of Perugia & IRCCS Santa Lucia, Italy) le 04 octobre 2025 à 11h en Salle du Conseil.
Titre de la présentation : Functional neuroimaging of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory
Résumé : Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is a rare condition in which individuals can recall personal events from nearly every day of their lives with striking accuracy and detail. Over the past decade, we screened the Italian population to identify individuals with this ability and employed functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to investigate its neural basis. Using both task-based and resting-state paradigms, we found that HSAM is linked to distinct patterns of brain activity and connectivity within networks supporting autobiographical recall, self-referential processing, and temporal organization. Individuals with HSAM showed heightened engagement of core regions of the autobiographical memory network, with a particularly prominent role for the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Notably, this increased activity emerged not only during autobiographical retrieval but also at rest, suggesting that HSAM may involve enhanced encoding and consolidation of external experiences. Together, these findings reveal unique functional interactions among brain regions that sustain HSAM. This talk will review these results and consider their implications for memory research and clinical neuroscience, with the perspective that identifying mechanisms underlying HSAM may ultimately help to inform strategies for supporting memory in pathological conditions.