Residual learning capability in organic amnesia.

This article provides a review of residual learning capability in patients suffering from the organic amnesic syndrome. It is shown that organic amnesics are able to learn a considerable number of laboratory tasks, many to a level comparable with normals. It shown that the tasks on which they succeed invariably involve testing situations which do not refer to specific preceding events (e.g. pursuit rotor, maze learning, picture completion, conditioning). It is concluded that this pattern of preserved learning capability can be interpreted as an impairment of episodic storage with the relative sparing of what is often described as "semantic memory".