VISUAL MEMORY-DEFICIT AMNESIA - A DISTINCT AMNESIC PRESENTATION AND ETIOLOGY

We describe a form of amnesia, which we have called visual memory-defi cit amnesia, that is caused by damage to areas of the visual system th at store visual information. Because it is caused by a deficit in acce ss to stored visual material and not by an impaired ability to encode or retrieve new material, it has the otherwise infrequent properties o f a more severe retrograde than anterograde amnesia with no temporal g radient in the retrograde amnesia. Of the 11 cases of long-term visual memory loss found in the literature, all had amnesia extending beyond a loss of visual memory, often including a near total loss of pretrau matic episodic memory. Of the 6 cases in which both the severity of re trograde and anterograde amnesia and the temporal gradient of the retr ograde amnesia were noted, 4 had a more severe retrograde amnesia with no temporal gradient and 2 had a less severe retrograde amnesia with a temporal gradient.