The perceptual priming phenomenon in amnesia.

Alcoholic Korsakoff patients and controls were given three variants of a priming task. In the first task, a study list of words was followed by a recognition test phase and then a perceptual identification test phase. In the second task, the order of the two test phases was reversed. The amnesics performed like normals on the priming for identification task and the delay did not affect their performance. However, recognition by amnesics was significantly impaired when the delay was introduced; although it too was normal with no delay. In a third task, pseudowords were used as stimuli. Under these conditions the amnesics could not be primed nor could they recognize the material. The implications of these findings for current theories of amnesia were discussed.