Preservation of Implicit Memory for New Associations in Global Amnesia

Abstract

This study examined whether amnesic patients have preserved implicit memory for new associations between unrelated words, as measured by repetition priming, despite impaired explicit memory for such new associations Prior studies provide conflicting and ambiguous results Amnesic and control participants read aloud visually presented, unrelated word pairs and then attempted to identify old, recombined, and new word pairs shown at threshold durations Amnesic and control groups showed equivalent priming for new associations by identifying old pairs better than recombined pairs Amnesic patients were impaired on a matched explicit test of memory for new associations The preserved priming in amnesia indicates that implicit memory for new associations need not be supported by the mnemonic processes and brain structures that mediate explicit memory for new associations.