The temporal pattern of retrograde amnesia in Korsakoff's disease.

A multiple-choice questionnaire about well-known public events of the past 50 years, grouped with respect to time, was administered to 11 alcoholic patients with Korsakoff's disease and to 50 normal individuals of comparable age and background. Normal persons perform quite well on questions of the recent past and fall off only slightly when tested for more remote memories. In contrast, patients with Korsakoff's disease do very poorly in remembering recent events but improve to normal levels when memories become more remote. This confirms classical clinical observation and raises some important points about the mechanism of memory.