Deja vecu for news events but not personal events: A dissociation between autobiographical and non-autobiographical episodic memory processing

In deja vu, the feeling that what we are currently experiencing we have experienced before is fleeting and is not accepted as true. In contrast, in deja vecu or recollective confabulation, the sense of deja vecu is persistent and convincing, and patients genuinely believe that they have lived through the current moment at some previous time. In previous reports of cases of deja vecu, both personal events and non-personal, world events gave rise to this experience. In this paper we describe a patient whose deja vecu experiences are entirely restricted to non personal events, suggesting that autobiographical and non-autobiographical episodic memory processing can dissociate. We suggest that this dissociation is secondary to differences in the degree to which personal and emotional associations are formed for these two different types of event, and offer a two-factor theory of deja vecu. Crown Copyright (C)2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.