Preserved complex emotion-based learning in amnesia
Section snippets
History
SL was an 85-year-old married man, with two grown up children, who worked as a building inspector before he retired. He suffered a posterior cerebral artery stroke in late 2003, 2 months prior to the initial assessment. CT scans indicated a large hypodense area across almost all of the left posterior cerebral artery territory, consistent with a recent infarct (see Fig. 1). On the left side, the lesion involved the medial and lateral surfaces of the occipital lobe, as well as the infero-medial
Results
Data were analysed in two separate ways: firstly, to observe whether there was learning during the individual sessions, and secondly whether there were any cumulative effects of learning across sessions.
Discussion
The key aim of the present study was to evaluate the performance of an amnesic patient on a measure of complex emotion-based learning. SL presented with a profound impairment of recent episodic memory, as shown by a range of floor, or chance, performances. In contrast, he showed reasonable levels of performance on tasks of immediate/working memory. This pattern of performance is entirely consistent with the sorts of episodic amnesia typically observed after lesion to the hippocampal memory
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Prof. Robert Rafal for his assistance with the neurological and neuroradiological aspects of the paper.
This research was funded by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and the Wellcome Trust.
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