Priming and recognition in ECT-induced amnesia.

Priming and recognition were tested in patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for treatment of a psychiatric disorder. Patients studied a list of words just prior to ECT and then received memory tests for those words after recovering from ECT. Stem-cued recall was poor (retrograde amnesia), but priming on word-stem completion was preserved. Recognition was poor on a "high-criterion" test requiring a retrieval-based judgment but partially intact on a "low-criterion" test requiring a familiarity-based judgment. The results support the familiarity-retrieval distinction in two-component theories of recognition and suggest that signal detection measures of sensitivity are not wholly independent of response criteria.