Amnesia & STM/LTM DISTINCTION

Amnesia & STM/LTM DISTINCTION

1. Anterograde Amnesia

   • Inability to make new memories
     • Reduced primacy
       • Intact recency
   • Intact STM

2. Patient HM

   • intractable eplipetic seizures
   • Surgery at 27, medial temporal lobes removed bilaterally.
   • Studied by Brenda Millner
   • Had anterograde amnesia
   • could acquire no new memories
   • Normal digit span
   • Memory for past was intact

3. Milner (1962)

   • 'Mirror drawing'
     • HM's performance improved over trials and days despite having no memory of doing the task before
   • Knowlton et al (1996)
     • Weather prediction game
       • amnesics can learn rules for weather game despite having no memory of seeing the rules before

4. Wesmacott & Moscovitch (2002):

   • Amnesic KC is not able to define words that entered the lexicon less than 5 years before injury.
     • Retrograde semantic impairment

5. Eichenbaum et al (2007)

   • Memory pathways
     • What route
       • Perirhinal and lateral entorhinal cortex
     • Where
       • Parrahipocampal and medial entorhinal cortex

6. Butters & Cermak (1986):

   • Patient PZ - Alcoholic.
     • Showed temporal gradiant of retrograde amnesia when tested on events from his autobiography.