Efficient recognition of pictures in organic amnesia.

Abstract

Weiskrantz and Warrington1–5 have reported that, in patients with organic amnesia, considerable retention of new information may be demonstrated provided memory is prompted by “partial information” such as a fragmented form of a test picture or the first two letters of a test word. They contrast this evidence with the patients' very poor memory when recall or recognition is tested and propose that amnesia is a condition in which memories fail to undergo normal processes of decay or inhibition. According to this disinhibition hypothesis, testing with partial information constrains the number of alternatives between which the amnesic patient must choose and so evades the abnormal interference from irrelevant memories.