Meudell P R, Mayes A R, MacDonald C, Pickering A, Fairbairn A F
Department of Psychology, University of Manchester.
Cortex. 1991 Sep;27(3):431-9. doi: 10.1016/s0010-9452(13)80038-x.
Alcoholic amnesics were given a test of temporal sequencing ability devised by Efron which has practically no memory component. These amnesics were very impaired on the task. However, the extent of this impairment did not relate to the magnitude of their "target memory" deficit nor did it relate to the ability to make temporal judgements from memory. Two other groups of amnesics (3 post-encephalitis and 4 with ruptured aneurysms of the anterior communicating artery) did not show impairments on the sequencing task. Data from the amnesic patient N.A. (who was unimpaired on the task), three other amnesics (who showed a tendency to be poor at the task) and two frontally damaged patients (one of whom performed especially badly on the sequencing task but had no obvious memory difficulties) were also presented. It is argued that deficits in temporal discrimination may not be found in all amnesics but, when they are observed, are an incidental feature related to additional (possibly cortical damage. Implications of the results for the view that amnesia results from a deficit in the use of contextual information (including temporal information) are considered.
对酒精性遗忘症患者进行了一项由埃弗龙设计的时间序列能力测试，该测试几乎没有记忆成分。这些遗忘症患者在这项任务上表现出严重受损。然而，这种损伤的程度与他们“目标记忆”缺陷的程度无关，也与从记忆中作出时间判断的能力无关。另外两组遗忘症患者（3名脑炎后患者和4名前交通动脉瘤破裂患者）在序列任务中未表现出损伤。还展示了遗忘症患者N.A.（该患者在任务中未受损）、另外三名遗忘症患者（他们在任务中表现出较差的倾向）以及两名额叶受损患者（其中一名在序列任务中表现特别差，但没有明显的记忆困难）的数据。有人认为，并非所有遗忘症患者都会出现时间辨别缺陷，但当观察到这种缺陷时，它是与额外（可能是皮质）损伤相关的附带特征。文中考虑了这些结果对遗忘症是由情境信息（包括时间信息）使用缺陷导致这一观点的影响。
