Amnesia and the brain

Question 1

Name the two different types of amnesia?

Answer 1

Anterograde and Retrograde

Question 2

Cannot remember events prior to the brain damage. What type of amnesia is this?

Answer 2

Retrograde

Question 3

Cannot later remember events that occur after brain damage. What type of amnesia is this?

Answer 3

Anterograde

Question 4

Name a few causes of anterograde amnesia.

Answer 4

Alzheimer’s
Korsakoff’s psychosis
Herpes encephalitis
Anoxia
Injuries
Surgeries for epilepsy involving temporal lobes
Degenerative brain diseases such as schizophrenia, MS, Huntington’s disease

Question 5

What condition did H.M have and what procedure was carried out as treatment?

Answer 5

HM had epileptic seizures and had his temporal lobes bilaterally resected.

Question 6

What did HM experience have after the procedure?

Answer 6

Severe anterograde amnesia

Question 7

What symptoms did H.M have after the procedure?

Answer 7

Intact short term memory and motor learning but poor long term memory for NEW material.

Question 8

Amnesia is global. What does this mean?

Answer 8

It means that various tests can be used to test amnesia and various modalities are affected such as visual, auditory, olfactory etc.

Question 9

Amnesics have intact skills in which three tasks?

Answer 9

Repetition priming
Mirror tracing
Mirror image reading task

Question 10

Spared skilled performance in Amnesia is seen despite:

Answer 10

little or no memory for learning experience or the skills acquired & little transfer to other tasks or contexts.

Question 11

In Graf et al (1984) experiment, a dissociation was found between cued recall and word stem completion. Which tasks were Amnesics impaired on?

Answer 11

Cued recall of words previously studied. But they were biased on word stem completions by previous word exposures.

Question 12

What other brain region other than the hippocampus can result in amnesia?

Answer 12

Damage to the mamillary bodies