Amnesia is a deficit in relational memory

Eye movements were monitored to assess memory for scenes indirectly (implic itly). Two eye movement-based memory phenomena were observed: (a) the repet ition effect, a decrease in sampling of previously viewed scenes compared w ith new scenes, reflecting memory for those scenes, and (b) the relational manipulation effect, an increase in viewing of the regions where manipulati ons of relations among scene elements had occurred. In normal control subje cts, the relational manipulation effect was expressed only in the absence o f explicit awareness of the scene manipulations. Thus, memory representatio ns of scenes contain information about relations among elements of the scen es, at least some of which is not accessible to verbal report. But amnesic patients with severe memory impairment failed to show the relational manipu lation effect. Their failure to show any demonstrable memory for relation's among the constituent elements scenes suggests that amnesia involves a fun damental deficit in relational (declarative) memory processing.