Amnesic Syndrome: Consolidation or Retrieval?

Retrieval and Reconsolidation: Toward a Neurobiology of Remembering

“…A series of important papers by Warrington and Weiskrantz, around the same time, showed that human amnestics could express normal memory performance if they were cued before the retention test. They suggested that at least some forms of amnesia are due to retrieval dysfunction rather than failure to consolidate memories (Weiskrantz 1966;Warrington and Weiskrantz 1970). These observations, reinforced by a strong conceptual framework provided by Spear (1973), encouraged further studies of retrieval in animals.…”

Convergent behavioral and neuropsychological evidence for a distinction between identification and production forms of repetition priming.

“…That explicit memory deficit did not prevent normal priming on the picture-naming and categoryexemplar verification tasks. Further, amnesic patients with comparable explicit memory deficits and medial-temporal pathologies have repeatedly shown normal priming on two tasks on which AD patients were impaired: word-stem completion Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1970) and categoryexemplar production Keane et al, 1997).…”

Exposure effects on music preference and recognition

“…Typically, implicit memory is revealed by tasks that do not require intentional or conscious recollection ofevents (Schacter, 1987). For example, in their pioneering study, Warrington and Weiskrantz (1970) presented a list of words to be studied to amnesic patients and their normal controls. Later, they asked the subjects to complete a series of non studied and studied word stems with the first word that came to mind.…”

“…For example, levels of processing (LOP) ofthe studied items affect performance on subsequent explicit tests but not on implicit ones; in contrast, changes in modality between study and test affect most forms of implicit memory tasks but not explicit memory ones (see Roediger & MeDermott, 1993, for a review). In keeping with the word stem completion task originally developed by Warrington and Weiskrantz (1970), it has been shown that having subjects judge the pleasantness of words or the clarity of pronunciation has no effect on the subsequent (implicit) completion ofthe stems ofthese words. In contrast, pleasantness judgments improve explicit recall of the presented word, when cued with its initial segment (see, e.g., Schacter & Church, 1992).…”