School of Psychology, University of East London, Romford Rd, London E154LZ, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 May;48(6):1707-15. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.018. Epub 2010 Feb 21.
Classical amnesia involves a difficulty in transferring information to long-term memory and can be detected with standard clinical tests. However, there are some patients who pass these tests but nonetheless show longer-term memory impairments. A case study is presented of a patient, RY, with temporal lobe epilepsy, who exhibited such a profile of "accelerated long-term forgetting". To investigate the effect of recalling information on later retention, recall and recognition for pairs of novel stories were tested at five intervals ranging from 30 min to 4 weeks; we also manipulated whether or not recall and recognition were repeatedly tested for stories. Two studies are reported, one before RY commenced treatment with anticonvulsant medication, and one following 6 months of treatment. Very similar memory profiles were observed in both settings. Against a background of above average cognitive function, results showed that RY's free recall, although initially average or above, was significantly impaired at extended delays (within 24h) for non-repeatedly recalled episodic information. However, this contrasted with normal performance for information that had been repeatedly recalled. An unresolved issue in the field is the impact of anticonvulsant medication on alleviating long-term forgetting, and the current study shows that anticonvulsant medication can have negligible beneficial effects in improving the rate of long-term forgetting in this type of patient. In addition, our study highlights the possible protective effect of active review of recent episodic memories.
经典遗忘症涉及将信息转移到长期记忆中的困难，可以通过标准的临床测试检测出来。然而，有些患者通过了这些测试，但仍表现出长期记忆障碍。本文介绍了一例颞叶癫痫患者 RY 的病例，他表现出这种“加速长期遗忘”的特征。为了研究回忆信息对以后保留的影响，在 30 分钟到 4 周的五个时间间隔内测试了对配对新故事的回忆和识别；我们还操纵了是否对故事进行重复回忆和识别。报告了两项研究，一项是在 RY 开始使用抗惊厥药物治疗之前，一项是在 6 个月治疗之后。在认知功能高于平均水平的背景下，结果表明，尽管 RY 的自由回忆最初处于平均或以上水平，但在 24 小时内对未重复回忆的情节信息的延迟记忆显著受损。然而，这与反复回忆信息的正常表现形成对比。该领域的一个悬而未决的问题是抗惊厥药物对缓解长期遗忘的影响，本研究表明，抗惊厥药物对改善这种类型患者的长期遗忘率几乎没有有益影响。此外，我们的研究强调了积极回顾最近的情节记忆的可能保护作用。
