Paired-associate learning and priming effects in amnesia: a neuropsychological study.

Despite severe deficits of recall and recognition, amnesic patients can exhibit normal priming effects. Amnesic patients have also been reported to perform well on tests of paired-associate learning that involve related word pairs (e.g., table-chair). The present study investigated the role of priming effects in paired-associate learning. Experiment 1 illustrated the distinction between the memory impairment of amnesic patients and their intact priming ability. Amnesic patients were markedly deficient in learning unrelated word pairs, despite exhibiting normal priming as measured by a word-completion test involving the same words. In Experiment 2A, amnesic patients showed good paired-associate learning for related word pairs, though control subjects still performed significantly better. In addition, the good performance by amnesic patients was short-lived, and performance fell to baseline after a 2-hr delay. Control subjects performed well above baseline at all delay conditions. Experiment 2B showed that the forgetting of related word pairs by amnesic patients followed the same time course as the decay of word priming. Experiment 3 showed that amnesic patients were as good as control subjects at learning related word pairs when incidental learning and test procedures were used (a word-association test). The advantage of control subjects over amnesic patients in Experiments 2A and 2B could therefore be attributed to the explicit learning instructions that are standard in paired-associate tests. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that amnesic patients exhibited normal priming when they were asked to "free associate" to words (e.g., child) that were semantically related to previously presented words (e.g., baby). The results indicate that both priming effects and paired-associate learning of related word pairs depend on activation, a process that is preserved in amnesia. Activation can account for the findings of good performance by amnesic patients on tests of word priming (Experiments 1 and 2B), related paired associates (Experiments 2A and 2B), and word association (Experiments 3 and 4). Activation is a transient phenomenon presumed to operate on and facilitate access to preexisting representations. Control subjects can establish new associations and can strengthen preexisting associations by engaging processes that are impaired in amnesia. As a result, when explicit learning instructions are used to test paired-associate learning of related word pairs, control subjects can learn better and can remember longer than can amnesic patients (Experiments 2A and 2B).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)