Carlesimo Giovanni A, Bonanni Rita, Caltagirone Carlo
Clinica Neurologica, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2003 May;25(3):391-406. doi: 10.1076/jcen.25.3.391.13810.
This study investigated the hypothesis that brain damaged patients with memory disorder are poorer at remembering the semantic than the perceptual attributes of information. Eight patients with memory impairment of different etiology and 24 patients with chronic consequences of severe closed-head injury were compared to similarly sized age- and literacy-matched normal control groups on recognition tests for the physical aspect and the semantic identity of words and pictures lists. In order to avoid interpretative problems deriving from different absolute levels of performance, study conditions were manipulated across subjects to obtain comparable accuracy on the perceptual recognition tests in the memory disordered and control groups. The results of the Picture Recognition test were consistent with the hypothesis. Indeed, having more time for the stimulus encoding, the two memory disordered groups performed at the same level as the normal subjects on the perceptual test but significantly lower on the semantic test. Instead, on the Word Recognition test, following study condition manipulation, patients and controls performed similarly on both the perceptual and the semantic tests. These data only partially support the hypothesis of the study; rather they suggest that in memory disordered patients there is a reduction of the advantage, exhibited by normal controls, of retrieving pictures over words (picture superiority effect).
患有记忆障碍的脑损伤患者在记忆信息的语义属性方面比感知属性方面表现更差。将8名病因不同的记忆障碍患者和24名患有严重闭合性颅脑损伤慢性后遗症的患者，与年龄和文化程度相匹配、规模相当的正常对照组，就单词和图片列表的物理特征和语义一致性进行识别测试。为了避免因不同的绝对表现水平而产生的解释问题，对研究条件进行了调整，以使记忆障碍组和对照组在感知识别测试中获得相当的准确率。图片识别测试的结果与该假设一致。事实上，由于有更多时间进行刺激编码，两个记忆障碍组在感知测试中的表现与正常受试者相当，但在语义测试中明显较低。相反，在单词识别测试中，经过研究条件调整后，患者和对照组在感知和语义测试中的表现相似。这些数据仅部分支持了该研究的假设；相反，它们表明，在记忆障碍患者中，正常对照组所表现出的在提取图片方面优于单词的优势（图片优势效应）有所减弱。
