ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case reports of two patients, AKP and MA, and describes their experience of recollective confabulation. Most strikingly, these patients did not merely report finding things familiar, but they also recollected details to justify their feelings: they ‘remembered’ non-existent previous episodes, such as having already read the newspaper and providing an account of how they had woken up early and secretly gone to read the newspaper as it was being unloaded from the lorry in the village. It was this tendency to generate false supporting information in the form of confabulations that led to label their behaviour as recollective confabulation. The chapter focuses on an interesting idea that encoding-related activity could be misinterpreted as retrieval-related. This proposal rests on the idea that the hippocampus supports novelty detection as well as recollection, and that recollection normally involves a transient and distinct theta-based coupling between the hippocampus and other regions that receive information from the hippocampus.
