Motivated confabulation

OP, a 73-year-old woman, suffered a closed head injury that caused bilateral damage to the temporal and frontal lobes. She had impaired access to episodic and semantic knowledge, showed some deficits in visual processing, performed at floor on tests of frontal lobe function, and was in the severely impaired range on tests of autobiographical memory. However, OP's most striking memory disturbance was that she confabulated. Her confabulated memories provided a basis for explanations of the behaviour of others towards her since her accident and In this respect were motivated confabulations. It Is argued that OP has suffered an impairment to executive functions and, as a consequence, can no longer discriminate mental representations of wishes and imaginings from memories of actual experiences.