The relationship between retrograde and anterograde amnesia in patients with typical global amnesia.

An extensive battery of tests of anterograde amnesia and remote memory was given to ten amnesics with lesions either to the medial temporal lobes of the diencephalon. These showed that the patients had anterograde amnesia with deficits in verbal and non-verbal recall and recognition, but preservation of word stem completion and intelligence. Mild impairments on executive tests and digit span performance were largely caused by the poor performance of the Korsakoff patients. The amnesics also showed remote memory deficits for personal and public domain information, and temporal gradients were observed for some of the tests. These deficits probably arose because the patients' anterograde amnesia was more severe than their retrograde amnesia even for the recent pre-morbid past. They were more impaired in the recall of details about famous names in their ability to recognize such names. There was also a suggestion that performance on anterograde tests did not relate strongly to that on tests of retrograde amnesia of the remote pre-morbid past. However, this effect was less apparent with memory for personal information when the format and the information tapped were matched on pre- and post-morbid tests.