Affective/motivational factors in the recall of prose passages by alcoholic Korsakoff patients

Abstract

The present study assessed the role of motivational/affective factors in the recall of short stories by alcoholic Korsakoff patients. On both immediate and delayed recall, the Korsakoff patients remembered proportionately more of stories with a sexual theme than of passages which were neutral or aggressive in content. In contrast to the Korsakoff patients, the emotional theme of the story had no effect upon the recall performance of alcoholic (non-Korsakoff) and normal control subjects. While the two control groups evidenced no forgetting of textual material between immediate and delayed recall, the alcoholic Korsakoff patients showed a rapid and equivalent rate of forgetting of all three story types. These findings suggest that while motivational/affective factors may influence the alcoholic Korsakoff patients' selective attention and immediate recall, they have little or no influence upon the patients' inability to retain verbal information. The importance of this conclusion for encoding theories of amnesia is discussed.