Attributions of Familiarity in Amnesia: Evidence From a Fame Judgment Task

To evaluate the extent to which amnesic patients can attribute the source of familiarity to its correct source during a fame judgment task, we placed gains in familiarity in opposition to conscious recollection. In a first experiment, patients and controls were told specifically that nonfamous names presented just prior to a fame judgment task were not famous; in a second experiment they were told that nonfamous names were in fact famous. Although such instructions produced dramatically different results in the fame judgment performance of normal control subjects, minimal change in attribution of fame occurred for the amnesic subjects. It is concluded that the amnesic subjects were unable to attribute the familiarity of a previously presented name to its correct source because of their inability to recollect a name's prior presentation. Hence, it may be the nature of the memory query rather than the adequacy of a specific memory system that determines whether or not an amnesic patient can access information in memory.