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| Research article summary (published 29 Apr 2009): |
Supra-normal age-linked retrograde amnesia: lessons from an older amnesic (H.M.).
Full Abstract
MacKay and James (2001) demonstrated greater-than-normal retrograde amnesia (RA) for lexical-semantic information in amnesic H.M., a deficit that worsened with aging or represented supranormal age-linked RA (SARA). The present experiments extend these earlier observations to new types of information. Experiment 1 participants (H.M. and carefully matched memory-normal controls) named pictures on the Boston Naming Test and H.M. correctly named reliably fewer pictures with low frequency names, he produced unusual naming errors, and he benefited reliably less than the controls from phonological cues to the target word. Experiment 2 participants recalled irregularly-spelled aspects of familiar words in a two-choice recognition memory task and H.M. chose the correct spelling reliably less often than the controls. Experiment 3 participants read low frequency words aloud at age 73 and H.M. produced reliably more reading errors than the controls. Results of all three experiments indicate supranormal RA (SRA) for information once familiar to H.M. and comparisons with earlier studies using similar or identical stimuli indicated that H.M.'s SRA has worsened with aging from 1980 to 1999. In short, H.M. exhibits SARA for phonological and orthographic information, consistent with the MacKay and James results and with interactions between aging and amnesia predicted under binding theory. Copyright 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Author information
Author/s: MacKay, Donald G (DG); Hadley, Christopher (C);
Affiliation: Psychology Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA. mackay(-atsign-)ucla.edu
Journal and publication information
Publication Type: Case Reports; Journal Article
Journal: Hippocampus (Hippocampus), published in United States. (Language: eng)
Reference: 2009-May; vol 19 (issue 5) : pp 424-45
Dates: Created 2009/04/20; Completed 2009/06/08;
PMID: 19115388, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/8/2009, IMS Date: 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00)
Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.
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