ILLUSORY MEMORIES IN AMNESIC PATIENTS - CONCEPTUAL AND PERCEPTUAL FALSE RECOGNITION

Little is known about the neuropsychology of false recognition. D. L. Schacter, M. Verfaellie, and D. Pradere (1996) induced false recogniti on in amnesic patients and normal controls by exposing them to numerou s semantic associates of a nonstudied word and found that amnesics sho wed significantly reduced levels of false recognition. To determine wh ether this outcome is specific to the semantic domain, the authors exa mined false recognition after exposure to lists of conceptually and pe rceptually related words. In the control group, conceptual false recog nition was associated with ''remember'' responses and perceptual false recognition was associated with ''know'' responses. Amnesic patients showed reduced levels of conceptual and perceptual false recognition t hat were approximately equally divided between remember and know respo nses.