An investigation of paired-associate learning in amnesic patients

Abstract Amnesic subjects are unable to learn unrelated verbal paired-associates but when words were combined according to their semantic or phonetic properties, original learning was the same in amnesic and control subjects. Amnesic subjects showed good retention of this learning after 30 min but were unable to learn a second, similar paired-associate task partly because of a large number of intrusion errors from List 1. Their performance on List 2 improved significantly when the differentiating characteristics were increased. The amnesic subjects' susceptibility to interfering influences was reaffirmed and conditions under which interference can be constrained were demonstrated. The relevance of the findings to current theoretical issues is also briefly discussed.