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The long term recovery of a series of 27 patients who had undergone rupture and repair of an aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery was assessed using a number of neuropsychological measures. Testing took place 12 to 84 months post surgery. On the basis of the results from tests of intellect, memory, and conceptual learning, three subgroups of patients were identified: those with persuasive cognitive defects, those with evidence of residual frontal lobe damage and those who showed no evidence of dysfunction. The occurrence of cerebral vasospasm was the most consistent predictor of long term cognitive deficit.

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The performance of matched groups of alcoholic KorsakorPs syndrome patients, amnesic alcoholics with intellectual deterioration, and nonamnesic alcoholic control patients was assessed on three experimental memory tests. On a task measuring rate of short-term forgetting, the KorsakofFs syndrome and demented groups were found to have equivalent forgetting rates and both showed significantly more rapid decay than the control group. The KorsakotFs syndrome and demented groups also performed similarly on a task designed to assess semantic encoding deficits by examining sensitivity to, and release from, proactive interference. In a third experiment, the findings of Graf, Squire, and Mandler (1984) were replicated, with both the amnesic and demented groups having normal semantic priming performance on word completion test. Again, no difference was found between the two amnesic groups on verbal free-and cued-recall tasks. These results suggest that the contribution of concurrent intellectual deterioration to the poor performance of alcoholic KorsakofFs syndrome patients on verbal retention tasks may not be as great as has been assumed.