Impaired Consolidation Processes Underlying Ecstasy-Group Deficits in Verbal Memory

The study aimed to examine the cognitive mechanisms underlying ecstasy consumer’s impaired performance on verbal list learning tasks [1-5]. This was achieved by comparing levels of forgetting across a related and a nonrelated word list. Forgetting a word that was previously recalled once indicated forgetting at level one, forgetting a word that had been recalled twice is forgetting at level 2, and so on. Thus, a higher frequency of low level forgetting indicates slower memory consolidation, whereas higher levels of forgetting indicate failure to retrieve learnt information [1].