Priming deficits in amnesia: Now you see them, now you don't

The rate with which perceptual information becomes available was manipulate d in 2 word naming experiments. Word griming effects, in terms of reduced n aming latencies for repeated items, and recognition memory measures were ob tained with matched groups of amnesic patients and control participants. In both experiments, the amnesic patients evidenced significantly reduced pri ming effects compared to control participants under difficult task conditio ns. Under easy task conditions the baseline naming latencies of the amnesic s were significantly longer than those of controls, but the difference in p riming effects failed to reach significance. The findings are consistent wi th the Information Availability model of priming positing that both priming and explicit memory are mediated by episodic information from a study or i nformation processing episode. It is argued that word priming does not repr esent a memory function that is spared in amnesia.