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Brain Advance Access published online on January 28, 2004
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awh107
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© 2004 The Guarantors of Brain

Article

Verbal recall in amnesiacs under conditions of diminished retroactive interference

Nelson Cowan 1*, Nicoletta Beschin 2, and Sergio Della Sala 3

1 Department of Psychological Sciences, 18 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
2 Dipartimento di Riabilitazione, Ospedale Somma Lombardo, Italy
3 Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, UK

* Corresponding author. E-mail: CowanN{at}missouri.edu.

Received 20 March 2003 ; revised 29 November 2003 ; accepted 9 December 2003

Abstract

In amnesiacs, stimuli that at first can be recalled are usually forgotten within 1 min, but the conditions required for this severe forgetting have remained unknown. To examine this, six patients with amnesia due to head injury or stroke and six normal controls heard lists of words (Experiment 1) and stories (Experiment 2). These stimuli were to be recalled immediately or after an extended test delay (10 min in Experiment 1; 1 h in Experiment 2). Although severe forgetting occurred in the amnesiacs following activity-filled delays, much less forgetting occurred in four of these patients after delays spent in a dark, quiet room. This was true even when the patients appeared to sleep during the delays. The results show, in a novel manner, that one deficit underlying their amnesias is vulnerability to retroactive interference.

Keywords: retroactive interference; amnesia; anterograde amnesia; memory; interference
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