Amnesic patients were induced to engage in semantic, phonemic or graphic encoding and were then assesed with a recognition memory test. Depressed patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and the patient N.A. did more poorly than controls, but exhibited a similar pattern of performance including superior retention of semantically encoded words. Normal control subjects tested three days after learning exhibited a pattern of performance similar to that of the amnesic patients. By contrast, patients with Korsakoff syndrome failed to exhibit superior retention of semantically encoded words, in keeping with previously reported results for this group of amnesic patients. The results suggest that amnesia is not a unitary disorder.