Although there is some evidence for a positive emotional bias in the content of confabulations in brain damaged patients, findings have been inconsistent. The present study used the semantic-associates procedure to induce false recall and false recognition in order to examine whether a positive bias would be found in confabulating amnesic patients, relative to non-confabulating amnesic patients...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether amnesic patients show a bivalency effect. The bivalency effect refers to the performance slowing that occurs when switching tasks and bivalent stimuli appear occasionally among univalent stimuli. According to the episodic context binding account, bivalent stimuli create a conflict-loaded context that is re-activated on subsequent trial...

False recognition occurs when people mistakenly claim that a novel item is familiar. After studying lists of semantically related words, healthy controls show extraordinarily high levels of false recognition to nonstudied lures that are semantic associates of study list words. In previous experiments, we found that both Korsakoff and non-Korsakoff amnesic patients show reduced levels of false r...

Previous research indicates that amnesic subjects tested on sequential learning or serial reaction time tasks can learn a repeated procedural sequence but are unable to explicitly recall the correct sequence when asked to generate the sequence. Rats with hippocampal lesions are also able to learn and remember procedural or implicit sequences but were impaired for declarative sequences. We used ...

The performance of amnesic patients was assessed on five tasks, which have figured prominently in the development of animal models of human amnesia in the monkey. The amnesic patients were impaired on four of these tasks (delayed nonmatching to sample, object-reward association, 8-pair concurrent discrimination learning, and an object discrimination task), in correspondence with previous findin...

Many symptom validity tests (SVTs) assess performance validity via declarative memory paradigms. One widely used SVT, the Word Memory Test (WMT), uses a variety of memory tests to assess performance. It is well known that declarative memory requires the hippocampus and related medial temporal lobe structures. In the present study, WMT performance was examined in nonlitigating amnesic subjects (...

Forced-choice tests of recognition have become the favoured behavioural method for the assessment of models of amnesia in nonhuman primates, yet the profile of deficits shown by human amnesic subjects remains uncertain. The present study explored the performance of 12 amnesic subjects on two delayed matching-to-sample tasks. Experiment 1, which used retention delays of between 2 and 60 sec, con...

This study compared the effects of fixed- and varied-context repetition on associative recognition in amnesia. Controls and amnesic participants were presented with a set of three-word phrases. Each was presented three times. In the varied-context condition, the verb changed with each presentation; in the fixed-context condition, it remained constant. At test, participants performed an associat...

The phenomenon of retrograde amnesia has important implications for understanding normal memory as well as its neural organization. Using 6 tests of remote memory, we evaluated the extent and severity of retrograde amnesia in 2 groups of amnesic patients-7 patients with alcoholic Korsakoff’s syndrome and 5 other patients with amnesia (anoxia or ischemia, N = 3; thalamic infarction, N = 1; unkno...

People showing the amnesic syndrome typically have intact working memory, unimpaired semantic memory, and normal procedural learning, priming, and classical conditioning. The central and most striking feature is difficulty in memory for newly acquired episodic material (Baddeley, 1997). Explanations of the amnesic syndrome using information processing accounts are based on the hypothetical memo...