IMPAIRED AND PRESERVED MEMORY PROCESSES IN AMNESIA

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DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): This project focuses on an information processing analysis of the amnesic patient's impaired and intact performance on verbal memory tasks, with the goal of specifying the nature of the memory processes that do and do not depend on the medial temporal and diencephalic brain structures damaged in amnesia. The first section of this proposal explores in detail the phenomenon of implicit memory in amnesia and focuses specifically on amnesiacs' ability to demonstrate priming for newly formed verbal associations. In order to specify which forms of associative learning depend on the medial temporal and diencephalic regions, the researchers will systematically investigate amnesiacs' performance across a range of implicit memory tasks in which new associative priming occurs at a perceptual, lexical, or conceptual level. The second section of this proposal focuses on amnesiacs' performance on explicit memory tasks and examines whether familiarity-based explicit memory is impaired to the same extent as is recollection-based explicit memory. The researchers address this question by directly measuring recollection and familiarity within a single task, both in terms of underlying processes and associated levels of awareness. They will also examine whether amnesiacs are equally impaired on different explicit memory tasks that are thought to differ in their underlying processing demands. Finally, they will examine the effect on amnesiacs' performance of several manipulations that selectively influence recollection. The third section of this proposal will examine the occurrence of memory illusions in amnesia by using a paradigm in both explicit and implicit memory, this line of studies provides a link to the other two lines of studies in this proposal.