Giovanello Kelly Sullivan, Verfaellie Mieke, Keane Margaret M
Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2003 Sep;3(3):186-94. doi: 10.3758/cabn.3.3.186.
In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesic patients and, likewise, diencephalic (DNC) amnesic patients evidence a disproportionate deficit in memory for associations in comparison with memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we equated item recognition in amnesic and control participants and found that, under these conditions, associative recognition remained impaired both for MTL patients and for DNC patients. To rule out an alternative interpretation of the results of Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 we compared the performance of amnesic and control participants on a one-item recognition task and a two-item recognition task that required no memory for the association between members of word pairs. In the MTL group, when single-item recognition was equated to that of the controls, two-item nonassociative pair memory was equivalent as well. In the DNC group, nonassociative pair memory was impaired, but this impairment did not fully account for the impairment in associative memory. These findings indicate that memory for novel associations between items is disproportionately impaired in comparison with memory for single items in amnesia.
在两项实验中，我们检验了以下假设：内侧颞叶（MTL）失忆症患者以及间脑（DNC）失忆症患者，与对单个项目的记忆相比，在对关联的记忆方面存在不成比例的缺陷。在实验1中，我们使失忆症患者和对照参与者的项目识别能力相等，发现在这些条件下，MTL患者和DNC患者的关联识别能力均仍然受损。为了排除对实验1结果的另一种解释，在实验2中，我们比较了失忆症患者和对照参与者在一项单项目识别任务和一项双项目识别任务上的表现，该双项目识别任务不需要对单词对成员之间的关联进行记忆。在MTL组中，当单项目识别与对照组相等时，双项目非关联对记忆也相当。在DNC组中，非关联对记忆受损，但这种损伤并不能完全解释关联记忆的损伤。这些发现表明，与失忆症中对单个项目的记忆相比，可以记忆项目之间的新关联的能力受到了不成比例的损害。
