Selective impairments within episodic memories

We report the case of a patient (T.R.) who developed a severe and selective amnesia for names and dates associated with events. His amnesia was temporally limited, affecting only the last two to three decades of his life. When recalling an event he was able to evoke both its content and place, while he could not provide any information about people (names or their physical features) and the time (date/period) of its occurrence. His performance on event-memory tests was consistent across the type of material used (personal and public events) or the period of life investigated. These results suggest that knowledge of an episode is specified across multiple representations.