Temporal order judgments with amnesia.

The hypothesis that patients with anterograde amnesia fail to recognize the temporal relations among recognizable past events was evaluated. Experiment 1 showed that order recognition for words in a list was at chance levels even though event recognition was significantly above chance. The same pattern did not obtain for intact adults. Experiment 2 examined event and order recognition for news events. Amnesics' event recognition for news events was quite accurate and comparable to controls, yet their order recognition was significantly below that of controls, again at chance levels. It is argued that the failure to encode the temporal relations among events has broad consequences for memory performance in general.