COVERT PHYSIOLOGIC RECOGNITION IN ALCOHOLIC AMNESIA

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Recent neuropsychological and cognitive-psychological research with normals and brain-damaged subjects has indicated that overt processes of stimulus identification can be dissociated from covert processes of stimulus recognition. Several studies have revealed positive evidence of covert recognition (e.g., autonomic discrimination, rudimentay lexical categorization) in the absence of overt verbal identification. This suggests that there are covert aspects of information-processing which are neither directly nor accurately reflected in verbal report data. The overall objective of the proposed research is to determine whether similar dissociations characterize the memory-recognition performance of alcoholic amnesics and three groups of controls. It is known that alcoholic amnesics show memory benefit ("savings") in repeated presentations of tasks they do not overtly remember previously performing. In this context, the purpose of the proposed studies is to determine whether such patients can covertly "recognize" learned material that they have overtly forgotten. This will be approached by studying dissociations and correlations between autonomic and verbal recognition indices in alcoholic Korsakoff patients, nonalcoholic amnesics, long-term alcoholics, and normal controls. Four paradigms widely used in memory research (simple recognition, rate-of-forgetting, temporal-gradient remote memory assessment, and levels-of-processing) will be employed to study the relationship between verbal and autonomic (i.e., electrodermal) indices of recognition under differing conditions. If it is the case that, in alcoholic Korsakoff patients and controls, autonomic evidence of learning occurs in the absence of overt verbal report, then several critical issues are raised. First, amnesic failures in memory paradigms may be more related to deficits in demonstrating knowledge than to having knowledge about learned stimuli. Second, the question, "does the patient remember" may be answered in different ways depending upon which response system is used to index memory performance. Third, the relationship between covert and overt recognition indices will have to be accounted for in theoretic models of amnesic memory defects.