Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
School of Psychology, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
Cortex. 2019 Jan;110:69-79. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.01.017. Epub 2018 Feb 2.
While most individuals who have problems acquiring new information forget at a normal rate, there have been reports of patients who show much more rapid forgetting, particularly comprising a subsample of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Currently available tests are generally not designed to test this since it requires multiple different tests of the same material. We describe two tests that aim to fill this gap, one verbal, the Crimes Test, the other visual, the Four Doors Test. Each test involves four scenes comprising five features. In each case, this allows four tests of 20 different questions to be produced and used at four different delays. Two experiments were run, each comprising a multi-test condition in which immediate testing was followed by retesting after 24 h, one week and one month, and a second condition involving a single test after one month. Both the visual and verbal tests showed clear evidence of forgetting in the single test condition, together with little evidence of forgetting in the multi-test conditions. We suggest that the testing of individual features encourages participants to remember the whole episode which then acts as a further reminder. Further research is needed to decide whether this serendipitous lack of forgetting in healthy individuals (decelerated long-term forgetting) will provide an ideal test of accelerated long-term forgetting by avoiding the danger of floor effects, or whether it will simply prove to be a further complication. Theoretical implications are discussed, as well as possible ways ahead in further investigating the surprisingly neglected field of long-term forgetting.
虽然大多数在获取新信息方面存在问题的个体遗忘速度正常，但也有报道称一些患者表现出更快的遗忘速度，尤其是颞叶癫痫患者中的亚组患者。目前可用的测试通常并非专门为此设计，因为这需要对同一材料进行多次不同的测试。我们描述了两项旨在弥补这一空白的测试，一项是口头的“犯罪测试”，另一项是视觉的“四门测试”。每个测试都涉及包含五个特征的四个场景。在每种情况下，这允许生成和使用四个测试，每个测试包含 20 个不同问题，延迟时间分别为 4 个不同的时间点。进行了两项实验，每个实验都包括多测试条件，其中立即测试后在 24 小时、一周和一个月后进行重新测试，第二个条件涉及一个月后进行单次测试。视觉和口头测试都在单次测试条件下显示出明显的遗忘证据，而在多测试条件下几乎没有遗忘证据。我们认为，对个别特征的测试鼓励参与者记住整个事件，然后作为进一步的提醒。需要进一步研究来确定这种健康个体中意外的无遗忘（减速的长期遗忘）是否会通过避免地板效应的危险来提供对加速的长期遗忘的理想测试，或者它是否只是证明是另一个复杂问题。讨论了理论意义，以及在进一步研究长期遗忘这一令人惊讶的被忽视领域方面可能的前进方向。
