Autobiographical memory (AM) is understood as the retrieval of personal experiences that occurred in specific time and space. To date, there is no consensus on the role of medial temporal lobe structures in AM. Therefore, we investigated AM in medial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients. Twenty TLE patients candidates for surgical treatment, 10 right (RTLE) and 10 left (LTLE), and 20 healthy controls were examined with a version of the Autobiographical Interview adapted to Spanish language. Episodic and semantic AM were analyzed during five life periods through two conditions: recall and specific probe. AM scores were compared with clinical and cognitive data. TLE patients showed lower performance in episodic AM than healthy controls, being significantly worst in RTLE group and after specific probe. In relation to semantic AM, LTLE retrieved higher amount of total semantic details compared to controls during recall, but not after specific probe. No significant differences were found between RTLE and LTLE, but a trend towards poorer performance in RTLE group was found. TLE patients obtained lower scores for adolescence period memories after specific probe. Our findings support the idea that the right hippocampus would play a more important role in episodic retrieval than the left, regardless of a temporal gradient. 1. Introduction Cognitive neuroscience over the years has been trying to elucidate which are the basic mechanisms underlying autobiographical memory (AM). Despite the vast amount of studies performed in this area there is still no consensus on the role of medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures. Medial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients provide a unique opportunity to systematically explore different aspects of AM processing considering the involvement of hippocampal structures on seizure onset and the connectivity to local and distal areas of MTL through the neural network related to epileptic spreading [1]. Epilepsy is a “pathologic model” that allows greater opportunities for research in clinical neuroscience than other neurological disorders, like stroke or dementia, in which massive damage of anatomical structures or a degenerative process is observed. An additional advantage is that most of these patients are young adults, whose illness could have begun in childhood, adolescence, or early adult life periods, giving us the chance to compare their performance at different stages. Furthermore, retrieval in this population has not a distinguished base level performance [2] which is central in the assessment of AM. Two prominent theories
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