Exporation cognitive et neuropsychologique du fonctionnement de la mémoire épisodique: Les processus de reconnaissance et la mémoire du contexte temporel

The main objective of our dissertation was to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in episodic memory and their cerebral substrates. More specifically, our work focused on two questions. First, we were interested in the contribution of recollection and familiarity to recognition memory. On the one hand, we examined the performance on recognition tasks when recollection cannot be used anymore (studies 1, 2 and 3) and, on the other hand, the influence of frontal lobe lesions on the processes involved in a recognition memory task (study 4).
Second, we explored the processes recruited in an important aspect of episodic memory, namely, memory for the temporal context of events, by studying the nature of the difficulties encountered by older adults on a task assessing memory for temporal information (studies 5 and 6).