Verfaellie M, Cermak L S, Blackford S P, Weiss S
Memory Disorders Research Center, Boston University School of Medicine, MA.
Brain Cogn. 1990 Jul;13(2):178-92. doi: 10.1016/0278-2626(90)90049-t.
To examine whether the organization of semantic memory is intact in alcoholic Korsakoff patients, three semantic memory tasks which do not require active search for stored information were administered to a group of Korsakoff patients and alcoholic controls. The first two tasks used a perceptual identification paradigm in which patients had to identify briefly presented targets preceded by associatively (experiment 1) or categorically (experiment 2) related primes. On both tasks, Korsakoff patients demonstrated intact priming effects. Because priming in these tasks was thought to reflect the operation of strategic processes, experiment 3 was designed to assess automatic spreading activation using a lexical decision task. Here as well, Korsakoff patients demonstrated intact priming. Taken together, these results support the view that the organization of semantic memory in Korsakoff patients has not been disrupted by their brain injury. The implications of these findings for understanding Korsakoff patients' impaired performance on semantic search tasks are discussed.
为了研究酒精性柯萨科夫综合征患者的语义记忆组织是否完整，对一组柯萨科夫综合征患者和酒精对照者进行了三项不需要主动搜索存储信息的语义记忆任务。前两项任务采用了知觉识别范式，患者必须识别在联想（实验1）或分类（实验2）相关启动刺激之后短暂呈现的目标。在这两项任务中，柯萨科夫综合征患者都表现出完整的启动效应。由于这些任务中的启动效应被认为反映了策略性过程的运作，实验3旨在使用词汇判断任务评估自动扩散激活。同样，柯萨科夫综合征患者在此也表现出完整的启动效应。综合来看，这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即柯萨科夫综合征患者的语义记忆组织并未因脑损伤而受到破坏。本文还讨论了这些发现对于理解柯萨科夫综合征患者在语义搜索任务中表现受损的意义。
