Jm. Reed et Lr. Squire, Impaired transverse patterning in human amnesia is a special case of impaired memory for two-choice discrimination tasks, BEHAV NEURO, 113(1), 1999, pp. 3-9
Three amnesic patients with damage limited to the hippocampal formation, a
severely amnesic patient with extensive medial temporal lobe damage, and 9
controls were tested on the transverse patterning problem (A + B-, B + C-,
and C + A-) and also on 2 control problems. One of the control problems was
matched to the transverse patterning problem with respect to the number of
pairwise decisions that were required. The 2nd control problem was matched
to the transverse patterning problem with respect to the number of trials
needed by controls to learn the task. The amnesic patients were impaired at
solving both the: transverse patterning problem and the control problems.
The findings suggest that impaired learning of the transverse patterning pr
oblem by amnesic patients derives from their general impairment in declarat
ive memory, which affects performance on most 2-choice discrimination tasks
.