Memory Integration in Amnesia: Prior Knowledge Supports Verbal Short-Term Memory - Essay Example

The first experiment in the study involved the sentence superiority effect evaluation. The participants of the study included eight patients suffering from amnesia with MTL lesions. Three of the participants (p03, p04, and p08) had lesions in the hippocampus. One participant (p01) had hippocampus and MTL cortices, and two patients (p05 and p02) had damage to the MTL cortices and hippocampus. The brain information of the participants is as shown in the figure below

Figure 1: the participating patients

The study also included 16 healthy controls that were matched to the patient group based on their age, verbal, education, and the forward digit span. The relationship between the patients and controls is as shown in figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Patient and control relationship

Results

Memory recall performance was recorded as the mean proportion of verbal words that were correctly recalled in each sequence. A remembered word was correct if its production was made in the correct position to correctly located word or adjacent word in the last serial position.

Discussion

A reliable superiority of the sentence effect was observed in participants suffering from amnesia. The immediate serial recall of words advanced in amnesia when words were presented as sentences and not as random word lists. The results support prior observation of the preservation of sentence superiority in amnesia development. The hippocampus activity has been observed previously in association with the effect of sentence superiority in healthy participants.

Conclusion

The study results indicate that the hippocampus is not important to leverage stored visuospatial and verbal knowledge in the support of immediate verbal recall. The issue raises the controversy of whether intact semantic information can be used in support of other tasks of the short-term memory, especially those that are impaired after hippocampus damage.