Kopelman M D
Academic Unit of Psychiatry, United Medical School, Guy's Hospital, London, U.K.
Neuropsychologia. 1991;29(8):737-47. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(91)90069-k.
On a non-verbal, short-term forgetting task, Alzheimer patients showed a severe impairment and Korsakoff patients a more moderate impairment. At block span, less demanding of information-processing resources. Alzheimer patients were impaired and Korsakoff patients intact. The pattern of results suggested that the impairment resulted from diminished processing resources and/or an encoding or retrieval deficit, rather than from accelerated decay of the memory trace, although this latter possibility could not be completely excluded. The impairment involved memory for location or position, and there was no evidence that "short-term" memory for sequence was disproportionately affected. The deficit correlated with the degree of general, cortical atrophy evident on a CT scan and with a measure of right hemisphere dysfunction (picture arrangement errors). Together, these findings suggest that right hemisphere atrophy may underlie the deficit in non-verbal, "short-term" tests. The results are compared with those obtained in previous studies employing a verbal, short-term forgetting (Brown-Peterson) task.
在一项非言语短期遗忘任务中，阿尔茨海默病患者表现出严重受损，而科尔萨科夫综合征患者受损程度较轻。在组块跨度任务中，对信息处理资源要求较低，阿尔茨海默病患者受损，而科尔萨科夫综合征患者未受损。结果模式表明，这种损伤是由处理资源减少和/或编码或检索缺陷导致的，而非记忆痕迹的加速衰退，尽管后一种可能性不能完全排除。这种损伤涉及对位置或方位的记忆，没有证据表明对序列的“短期”记忆受到不成比例的影响。这种缺陷与CT扫描显示的总体皮质萎缩程度以及一项右半球功能障碍指标（图片排列错误）相关。这些发现共同表明，右半球萎缩可能是非言语“短期”测试中缺陷的基础。将这些结果与之前使用言语短期遗忘（布朗-彼得森）任务获得的结果进行了比较。
