Priming and recognition in ECT-induced amnesia

Abstract

and JOHN MISIASZEK University ofArizona CoUege ofMedicine, Tucson, ArizonaPriming and recognition were tested in patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for treatment of a psychiatric disorder. Patients studied a list of words just prior to ECT and then received memory tests for those words after recovering from ECT. Stem-cued recall was poor (retrograde amnesia), but priming on word-stem completion was preserved. Recognition was poor on a "high-criterion" test requiring a retrieval-based judgment but partially intact on a "low-criterion" test requiring a familiarity-based judgment. The results support the familiarity-retrieval distinction in two-component theories of recognition and suggest that signal detection measures of sensitivity are not wholly independent ofresponse criteria.

Recognition memory in amnesia: Effects of relaxing response criteria

“…Most importantly, while this manipulation affected control subjects' response bias, it enhanced amnesics' discriminability. Using a different experimental manipulation, these results extend the findings of Dorfman et al (1995) to patients with global amnesia.…”

“…In this experiment, we employed the same manipulation of response criterion that was used in previous studies (Dorfman et al, 1995;Reber & Squire, 1999). Our first goal was to establish whether instructions to set a more lenient criterion would improve discriminability in patients with global amnesia.…”

“…Our first goal was to establish whether instructions to set a more lenient criterion would improve discriminability in patients with global amnesia. Our second goal was to evaluate the claim of Dorfman et al (1995) that changes in discriminability were associated with enhanced familiarity-based recognition.…”

“…Dorfman and colleagues (Dorfman, Kihlstrom, Cork, & Misiaszek, 1995) reported that they had successfully enhanced the recognition performance of patients with ECT-induced amnesia by asking them to relax their response criterion. In a high-criterion condition, participants were told to endorse a test word only if they were relatively sure that it had appeared on the study list.…”

“…Experiment 1 was modeled after a study by Dorfman, Kihlstrom, Cork, and Misiaszek (1995), in which direct instructions to respond more leniently led to an increase in recognition accuracy in patients with ECT-induced amnesia. We failed to extend this finding to patients with global amnesia, but the manipulation was unsuccessful in control subjects as well.…”