Forms of Memory Failure

Abstract

Memory may fail in a variety of ways. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome demonstrate global memory deficits similar to those seen in patients with early progressive dementia. Korsakoff's patients, however, may recall rules and principles for organizing information and can gain access to their previously acquired knowledge (semantic memory), whereas recent memory may be grossly impaired. In contrast, dementia patients may have little access to previously acquired knowledge and therefore have great difficulty in organizing and encoding ongoing events. These contrasting forms of memory failure have implications for understanding the structure and mechanisms of memory and learning, particularly the relationship between episodic and semantic memory, as well as the development of therapeutic strategies for cognitive impairments.

Event perception: A mind-brain perspective.

“…On its face, DAT is a reasonable candidate for a disorder affecting event representations because patients with the disorder sometimes fail to remain oriented with regard to the time, location, and people present in a given situation. Two studies examined the ability of patients with DAT to generate scripts for a particular activity or to verify the order in which two actions typically occurred in an activity (Weingartner, Grafman, Boutelle, Kaye, & Martin, 1983;Grafman, et al, 1991). Such tasks should depend on the presence of intact event schemata and may involve the construction of event models.…”

Structured event complexes in the medial prefrontal cortex support counterfactual representations for future planning

“…Event components interact and give rise to SECs through at least three binding mechanisms: sequential binding, proposed for linking multiple SECs within the PFC ( Weingartner et al 1983); temporal binding among anatomically integrated regions representing event subcomponents in the posterior cortex ( Engel & Singer 2001); and third-party binding of anatomically loosely connected regions whose activity is synchronized via the hippocampus (Weingartner et al 1983;O'Reilly & Rudy 2000).…”

Ketamine-Induced Exacerbation of Psychotic Symptoms and Cognitive Impairment in Neuroleptic-Free Schizophrenics

“…These tasks have been standardized and validated in studies of the effects of different classes of drugs in a number of patient populations (Weingartner et al 1982(Weingartner et al , 1983a(Weingartner et al , 1983b(Weingartner et al , 1992. Subjects were read a list of 12 categorically-related words at a 2 second rate.…”