Prospective remembering of Korsakoffs and alcoholics as a function of the prospective-memory and on-going tasks

Prospective memory is assumed to rely more on the frontal lobes than retros pective memory. Since Korsakoff patients are known to suffer from a general cerebral atrophy and a frontal lobe atrophy in particular, they are expect ed to show considerably impaired prospective memory. In Experiment 1, the p erformance of Korsakoff patients on a semantic prospective-memory task (whi ch was embedded in a perceptual on-going task) was particularly bad in Sess ion 1; in Session 2, the Korsakoff patients improved substantially, to reac h the performance level of nonamnesic alcoholics. In Experiment 2, prospect ive memory of the Korsakoff patients and nonamnesic alcoholics was better w hen the on-going task was more similar to the prospective memory task; part icularly striking was the much better prospective memory in the semantic pr ospective-memory task when the on-going task requires a semantic analysis t han when the on-going task requires perceptual processing. The findings are in agreement with a task-appropriate processing explanation but also in pa rtial agreement with the attention hypothesis of the instance theory of aut omaticity. Contrary to the frontal lobe hypothesis, prospective memory of t he Korsakoff patients was surprisingly good in several aspects of the two e xperiments. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.