Elsevier

Brain and Cognition

Volume 8, Issue 1, August 1988, Pages 3-20
Brain and Cognition

Priming of semantic autobiographical knowledge: A case study of retrograde amnesia

https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-2626(88)90035-8Get rights and content

Abstract

The case of a 36-year-old man who suffers dense retrograde and anterograde amnesia as a result of closed-head injury that caused extensive damage to his left frontal-parietal and right parieto-occipital lobes is described. Patient K.C. has normal intelligence and relatively well-preserved perceptual, linguistic, short-term memory, and reasoning abilities. He possesses some fragmentary general knowledge about his autobiographical past, but he does not remember a single personal event or happening from any time of his life. He has some preserved expert knowledge related to the work he did for 3 years before the onset of amnesia, although he has no personal recollections from that period. Some features of K.C.'s retrograde amnesia can be interpreted in terms of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, and in terms of the distinction between episodic and semantic autobiographical knowledge. K.C.'s semantic knowledge, but not his episodic knowledge, showed progressive improvement, or priming, in the course of the investigation.

References (51)

  • M.S. Albert et al.

    Temporal gradients in the retrograde amnesia of patients with alcoholic Korsakoff's disease

    Archives of Neurology

    (1979)
  • D.F. Benson et al.

    Shrinking retrograde amnesia

    Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry

    (1967)
  • N. Butters et al.

    Processes underlying failures to recall remote events

  • N. Butters et al.

    A case study of the forgetting of autobiographical knowledge: Implications for the study of retrograde amnesia

  • L.S. Cermak

    The episodic/semantic distinction in amnesia

  • L.S. Cermak

    Amnesia as a processing deficit

  • H.F. Crovitz et al.

    Frequency of episodic memories as a function of their age

    Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society

    (1974)
  • A.R. Damasio et al.

    Multimodal amnesic syndrome following bilateral temporal and basal forebrain damage

    Archives of Neurology

    (1985)
  • E.L. Glisky et al.

    Learning and retention of computer-related vocabulary in memory-impaired patients: Method of vanishing cues

    Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology

    (1986)
  • E. Goldberg

    Relationship between semantic and episodic amnesias

    (1987)
  • E. Goldberg et al.

    Neuropsychological perspectives: Retrograde amnesia and executive deficits

  • J. Hudson

    Memories are made of this: General event knowledge and the development of autobiographic memory

  • D. Ingvar

    “Memory of the future”: An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness

    Human Neurobiology

    (1985)
  • M. Kinsbourne

    Brain mechanisms and memory

    Human Neurobiology

    (1987)
  • M. Kinsbourne et al.

    Short-term memory processes and the amnesic syndrome

  • Cited by (0)

    This research was supported by a Special Research Program Grant from the Connaught Fund, University of Toronto, and aided by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Endel Tulving and Daniel Schacter, and by grants from the Medical Research Council of Canada and Ontario Mental Health Foundation to Morris Moscovitch.

    View full text