PRIMING AND RECOGNITION IN ECT-INDUCED AMNESIA

Priming and recognition were tested in patients receiving electroconvu lsive therapy (ECT) for treatment of a psychiatric disorder. Patients studied a list of words just prior to ECT and then received memory tes ts for those words after recovering from ECT. Stem-cued recall was poo r (retrograde amnesia), but priming on word-stem completion was preser ved. Recognition was poor on a ''high-criterion'' test requiring a ret rieval-based judgment but partially intact on a ''low-criterion'' test requiring a familiarity-based judgment. The results support the famil iarity-retrieval distinction in two-component theories of recognition and suggest that signal detection measures of sensitivity are not whol ly independent of response criteria.