Impaired Self–Recognition from Recent Photographs in a Case of Late–Stage Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Clinical descriptions of Alzheimer's disease often indicate that the patient suffers from a loss of a “sense of self.” Recent work on the structure of representations specialized for knowledge about the self has suggested that aspects of self–knowledge may be separable from one another (e.g., Klein, 2004). Here, we report a case of a woman with late-stage Alzheimer's dementia who is unable to recognize herself from photographs taken in her recent past, but who has little difficulty with self–recognition from photographs taken during the first two decades of her adult life. This finding is discussed in terms of a general, temporally graded decrement in semantic memory for autobiographical self–knowledge.