THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RETROGRADE AND ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA IN PATIENTS WITH TYPICAL GLOBAL AMNESIA

An extensive battery of tests of anterograde amnesia and remote memory was given to ten amnesics with lesions either to the medial temporal lobes of the diencephalon. These showed that the patients had anterogr ade amnesia with deficits in verbal and non-verbal recall and recognit ion, but preservation of word stem completion and intelligence. Mild i mpairments on executive tests and digit span performance were largely caused by the poor performance of the Korsakoff patients. The amnesics also showed remote memory deficits for personal and public domain inf ormation, and temporal gradients were observed for some of the tests. These deficits probably arose because the patients' anterograde amnesi a was more severe than their retrograde amnesia even for the recent pr e-morbid past. They were more impaired in the recall of details about famous names than in their ability to recognize such names. There was also a suggestion that performance on anterograde tests did not relate strongly to that on tests of retrograde amnesia of the remote pre-mor bid past. However, this effect was less apparent with memory for perso nal information when the format and the information tapped were matche d on pre- and post-morbid tests.