CATEGORY GENERATION TESTING IN THE SEARCH FOR IMPLICIT MEMORY DURING GENERAL-ANESTHESIA

We gave auditory examples of two semantic categories through headphone s to 100 surgical patients anaesthetized with propofol and enflurane. This presentation was made during certain stages of the procedure, pot entially associated with arousal, and during steady-state anaesthesia. Postoperative review using category generation tests showed successfu l priming in a pre-induction group but no evidence of implicit memory in the anaesthetized groups. These results suggest that timing an audi tory input to coincide with surgical stimulation does not increase the probability of retrieval of information by this type of testing.