Preservation of priming for interactive context in amnesics.

The performance of a group of 12 amnesics of mixed aetiology was compared with that of two groups of normal subjects on a priming task in which subjects' spontaneous definitions of homonyms were biased in accordance with the sense of interactive context words which had earlier been shown with the homonyms. The amnesics showed significant and normal levels of interactive context priming even when the amount of attention paid to the interactive context words was minimized during training. Reducing the amount of attention paid to the context words during training did, however, decrease the amount of priming, shown by both groups of subjects, to the same degree. It also decreased recognition of trained homonym-context word pairs to a similar extent in amnesics and normal people. In an additional condition of the study, it was shown that normal subjects were aware of the meaningful relationship between homonyms and context words even when the amount of attention they paid to context words was minimized during training. Priming seemed to be stochastically independent of recognition and was also unrelated to signs of frontal lobe damage, intelligence or explicit memory. All three groups of subjects showed similar and significant levels of priming regardless of whether or not only definitions that made no direct reference to the context words were scored. It was concluded that amnesics have preserved priming for interactive context words that are encoded with low levels of attention even though there is evidence that they have a disproportionate recognition deficit for this kind of information under these conditions. The theoretical implications of the results are discussed.