Previous work has shown that instructing subjects to give special priority to one target event in a list enhances recall for that event, but impairs recall for the events immediately preceding it (Tulving, 1969). We examined the benefit of high-priority instructions, and the retrograde amnesia for previous items, in three experiments that included two explicit tests of memory (free recall and c...

In a previous study we showed a temporally graded retrograde amnesia after hippocampal lesions when rats learned a spatial reference memory task in which two types of signals simultaneously indicated the goal arm (shape of the experimental room and extramaze landmarks). To investigate the effect that the navigational demands of the task have on remote memory expression, the same task was used i...

T. Ribot's (1881) law of retrograde amnesia states that brain damage impairs recently formed memories to a greater extent than older memories, which is generally taken to imply that memories need time to consolidate. A. Jost's (1897) law of forgetting states that if 2 memories are of the same strength but different ages, the older will decay more slowly than the younger. The main theoretical im...

This paper reviews disorders of memory. After a brief survey of the clinical varieties of the amnesic syndrome, transient and persistent, selected theoretical issues will be considered by posing a series of questions. (i) What is impaired and what is spared in anterograde amnesia? (ii) Do temporal lobe, diencephalic and frontal lobe amnesias differ? (iii) How independently semantic is semantic ...

Amnesia (Fig. 1) has been defined as ‘an abnormal mental state in which memory and learning are affected out of all proportion to other cognitive functions in an otherwise alert and responsive patient’ (Victor 1971). Memory impairment can affect the learning of new material (anterograde amnesia), owing to impairments in the encoding, storage or retrieval stages. It can also affect the recall of...

The fact that information acquired before the onset of amnesia can be lost (retrograde amnesia) has fascinated psychologists, biologists, and clinicians for over 100 years. Studies of retrograde amnesia have led to the concept of memory consolidation, whereby medial temporal lobe structures direct the gradual establishment of memory representations in neocortex. Recent theoretical accounts have...

This study develops a new theory of long-term retrograde amnesia that encompasses episodic and semantic memory, including word knowledge. Under the theory, retrograde amnesia in both normal individuals and hippocampal amnesics reflects transmission deficits caused by aging, nonrecent use of connections, and infrequent use of connections over the life span. However, transmission deficits cause s...

Two patients who shared similar presenting clinical features of anterograde and retrograde autobiographical amnesia typical of transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) underwent prolonged video electroencephalogram (VEEG) monitoring and were found to have sleep-activated epileptiform activity and frequent subclinical bitemporal seizures predominantly during sleep. Case 1 is a 59-year-old woman whose p...

We studied the importance of the hippocampus and subiculum for anterograde and retrograde memory in the rat using social transmission of food preference, a nonspatial memory task. Experiment 1 asked how long an acquired food preference could be remembered. In experiment 2, we determined the anterograde amnesic effects of large lesions of the hippocampus that included the subiculum. In experimen...