Memory problems are a sequella of a number of diseases, including herpes encephalitis, stroke, dementia, ischemia and aneurysms. These problems will never be fully understood until organization of the memory system is better understood, both in neurological and psychological terms. The study of amnesia can bear on both the neurological and psychological descriptions of memory. But the neuroscientist or psychologist can only build memory models from this source of evidence when the amnesic syndrome has been adequately characterized. The proposed research is designed to consolidate a recent finding that amnesic recognition is relatively preserved when compared to amnesic recall and to determine whether the amnesic deficit can be characterized not as a failure to encode item information, but as a failure to encode the larger context in which the item is placed, including inter item associations. Experiments designed to test this latter hypothesis, which will be called the Coherence Hypothesis, will investigate the representations of amnesics' direct memories. The Coherence Hypothesis will also be tested in a recognition and recall, SAM. If the results are as expected, the amnesic deficit may not involve the encoding of item information, but the encoding of context and inter item associations. This dichotomy differs from the present, widely accepted dichotomy between direct and indirect memory and may offer an alternative that not only accounts for amnesics' relatively preserved recognition, but also their intact priming and possibly their preserved skill learning.
| Manier, David; Apetroaia, Ioana; Pappas, Zissis et al. (2004) Implicit contributions of context to recognition. Conscious Cogn 13:471-83 |
