Amnesic patients (n = 8), who have severely impaired declarative memory, learned a probabilistic classification task at the same rate as normal subjects (n = 16) but subsequently were impaired on transfer tests that required flexible use of their task knowledge. A second group of controls (n = 20) rated the questions on the transfer tests according to whether the questions simply reinstated the...

Hypnotic Ss received posthypnotic suggestions (a) to begin all sentences to the ostensible experimental (Taffel) task with "he" and "they," and (b) to be unaware of and amnesic for this fact. Waking simulator Ss received identical suggestions preceded by instructions to behave later as though they had been hypnotized when they received the suggestions. During a postexperimental inquiry with a d...

Patients with anterograde amnesia are commonly believed to exhibit normal implicit learning. Research with the serial reaction time (SRT) task suggests that normal subjects can implicitly learn visuospatial sequences through a process that is sensitive to higher-order information that is more complex than pairwise associations between adjacent stimuli. The present research reexamined SRT learni...

1Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 2Kessler Medical Rehabilitation Research and Education Corporation, West Orange, NJ 3Kessler Medical Rehabilitation Research and Education Corporation, West Orange, NJ Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ 4Center for Molecular and Beha...

This study develops a new theory of long-term retrograde amnesia that encompasses episodic and semantic memory, including word knowledge. Under the theory, retrograde amnesia in both normal individuals and hippocampal amnesics reflects transmission deficits caused by aging, nonrecent use of connections, and infrequent use of connections over the life span. However, transmission deficits cause s...

It has been reported that the administration of cycloheximide, a protein synthesis inhibitor, depresses brain tyrosine hydroxylase activity as measured in vitro. This finding raised the possibility that the amnesic effect of this drug could be due to reduction of norepinephrine synthesis rather than to inhibition of protein synthesis required for long-term memory. We have found that (1) amnesic...

Adaptive ongoing behavior requires using immediate sensory input to guide upcoming actions. Using a novel paradigm with volitional exploration of visuo-spatial scenes, we revealed novel deficits among hippocampal amnesic patients in effective spatial exploration of scenes, indicated by less-systematic exploration patterns than those of healthy comparison subjects. The disorganized exploration b...

Previous research suggests that early performance of amnesic individuals in a probabilistic category learning task is relatively unimpaired. When combined with impaired declarative knowledge, this is taken as evidence for the existence of separate implicit and explicit memory systems. The present study contains a more fine-grained analysis of learning than earlier studies. Using a dynamic lens ...