Olson Ingrid R, Berryhill Marian E, Drowos David B, Brown Lawrence, Chatterjee Anjan
Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Neurocase. 2010 Jun;16(3):208-18. doi: 10.1080/13554790903405701. Epub 2010 Jan 25.
Patients with memory disorders have severely restricted learning and memory. For instance, patients with anterograde amnesia can learn motor procedures and retain some restricted ability to learn new words and factual information. However, such learning is inflexible and frequently inaccessible to conscious awareness. Here we present a case of patient AC596, a 25-year-old male with severe episodic memory impairments, presumably due to anoxia during a preterm birth. In contrast to his poor episodic memory, he exhibits savant-like memory for calendar information that can be flexibly accessed by day, month, and year cues. He also has the ability to recollect the exact date of a wide range of personal experiences over the past 20 years. The patient appears to supplement his generally poor episodic memory by using memorized calendar information as a retrieval cue for autobiographical events. These findings indicate that islands of preserved memory functioning, such as a highly developed semantic memory system, can exist in individuals with severely impaired episodic memory systems. In this particular case, our patient's memory for dates far outstripped that of normal individuals and served as a keen retrieval cue, allowing him to access information that was otherwise unavailable.
患有记忆障碍的患者学习和记忆能力严重受限。例如，患有顺行性遗忘症的患者能够学习运动程序，并保留一些学习新单词和事实信息的有限能力。然而，这种学习缺乏灵活性，且常常无法被意识所察觉。在此，我们介绍一例AC596患者，一名25岁男性，患有严重的情景记忆障碍，可能是由于早产时缺氧所致。与他糟糕的情景记忆形成对比的是，他对日历信息表现出学者般的记忆能力，能够通过日、月和年的提示灵活获取。他还能够回忆起过去20年中广泛的个人经历的确切日期。该患者似乎通过将记忆中的日历信息用作自传事件的检索线索，来弥补其总体较差的情景记忆。这些发现表明，在情景记忆系统严重受损的个体中，可能存在记忆功能保留的孤岛，比如高度发达语义记忆系统。在这个特殊案例中，我们患者对日期的记忆远远超过正常个体，并成为一个敏锐的检索线索，使他能够获取那些原本无法获得的信息。
