Ninety-eight undergraduates were given a list of 20 common English nouns and told to inspect each word until a specific episodic memory associated with it came to mind, and to write a few words to identify that memory. After finishing the list, they were asked to go back and to date the episodic memories as accurately as they could. The frequency of memories as a function of their age was found to be log log linear, with the frequency inversely related to the age of memory_ It would be desirable to expose by listing, the full store of episodic memory. Such a list should include the age of each memory as referred to the present. If we were now to examine the distribution of memories as a function of their age, there is reason to believe the frequency of the more aged memories would be reduced.Galton (I 879a, 1879b) in a study of his own memorial process, developed the method of unconstrained search to allow him to sample his store of episodic memory. His method consisted of inspecting a word until an association to it was made _ If that association referred to an event remembered from his past, he dated that memory. At the time Galton carried out this study, he was 57 years old and, using only three coarse time intervals, found that 39% of the memories were dated prior to the age of 22, 46% were from subsequent manhood, and 15% were reported by him to refer to "quite recent events."The stimulus words which Galton used were not common ones which were likely to refer to events common to all times of life, and his three categories were arbitrary. We sought to develop Galton's method as an unbiased probe into the store of episodic memory and to treat the reported ages of memories in an unbiased and meaningful way. METHOD SubjectsSubjects were 98 undergraduates from Duke University who were run in groups of about 20 each_ Word listThe stimulus list was a random set of 20 of the 29 English words of extreme familiarity all having the features of being in the set ofbasic English picturable nouns (Ogden, \934), having a score of at least 6.00 on I, and C, and M, in the word list of

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Studies which provide quantitative analyses of memory function following closed head injury were reviewed. Specific issues covered include criteria for assessing post-traumatic amnesia (PTA), PTA duration, relation of PTA duration to later memory impairment, memory functions within PTA, and comparisons between PTA and other amnesic conditions. Issues associated with the assessment of retrograde amnesia were also reviewed. With regard to memory function after PTA has terminated, we described and discussed normative data, the time course of recovery, and issues related to the nature of the later memory impairment. Directions for future work which seem particularly useful from a practical and theoretical viewpoint were also considered.

Patients were asked twelve orientation questions before ECT and during the recovery period (the postictal confusional state) following ECT. Disorientation was more severe in the elderly. The different orientation items did not recover simultaneously; different recovery times may enable patients to give responses that are logical contradictions. While certain models (e.g., "person" versus "place" versus "time") may be useful in describing the differential recovery of orientation items, other models based on memory will probably prove more useful in delineating what causes this differential recovery. Patients gave responses to age and current year that were displaced backwards in years from the correct response. It is suggested that this displacement represents retrograde amnesia. As the postictal confusional state cleared, however, these backwardly displaced responses decreased in years of remoteness, thus showing a pattern of "shrinkage" that is similar to shrinking retrograde amnesia following head-injury. It is suggested that this result supports Ribot's law of regression.