Restricted use of success cues in retrieval during posthypnotic amnesia.

Memory for successful and unsuccessful responses to hypnotic suggestions was evaluated in partially amnesic subjects and in those subjects with normal forgetting. Two analyses (N= 278) demonstrated that highly hypnotizable subjects experiencing partial posthypnotic amnesia tended to show no selective recall for their successes or failures during amnesia, whereas the remainder of the subjects showed definite selective recall of hypnotic success posthypnotically. These findings lend support to the hypothesis put forth by Evans and Kihlstrom that posthypnotic amnesia involves a disruption of memory organization and suggests that the phenomenon may be mediated by a restriction in the use of normally employed retrieval cues.