THE EFFECTS OF INTERFERENCE ON VERBAL-LEARNING IN MULTIPLE-SCLEROSIS

Thirty multiple sclerosis (MS) patients were compared with 30 marched (age and education) controls and were asked to learn and recall 20 tar get words that were placed among 24 distracter words. Targets and dist racters were printed on different colored cards, and the subjects were asked to read each word aloud and recall the target words. This task war repeated four times. The MS patients recalled significantly fewer words across the four trials. A second list without distracters war pr esented for two trials, and there were no significant differences betw een the groups' recall. Subsequent recall (short delay and long delay) for List 1 revealed significantly poorer recall for the MS group and significantly poorer cued recall but not recognition memory. Retrieval processes were implicated such as source memory, or contextual stampi ng, rather than encoding mechanisms. Copyright (C) 1996 National Acade my of Neuropsychology