WORD PRIMING WITH BRIEF MULTIPLE PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE - PRESERVATION IN AMNESIA

Many studies have shown relative preservation of word priming in subje cts with mild amnesia, but some decrease in severe amnesia. This calls into question the degree of separation between implicit and explicit memory. Possible contamination of implicit memory tasks by impaired ex plicit memory strategies might be obscuring the actual dissociation be tween the two memory systems. We have developed a method of circumvent ing explicit memory contamination by using brief duration repeated pri mes below the awareness threshold of subjects. We have used this appro ach to evaluate the status of word priming in densely amnesic subjects . One group of amnesic subjects with alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome an d one group of normal elderly control subjects were tested for word pr iming on a speeded category membership decision task. Implicit or expl icit encoding procedures were used in three different experiments. Res ults demonstrated that brief multiple presentation of words can offer a means of producing word priming in the absence of explicit recogniti on or recall of the primed words in both amnesic subjects and normal e lderly control subjects. Moreover, there was no significant difference in the magnitude of the priming effect between these groups in the th ree experiments. These findings show that amnesic subjects can exhibit normal levels of word priming. They also suggest that amnesics retain the capacity to encode, store and retrieve information implicitly, e. g. unintentionally. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.