Rate of Forgetting in Amnesia: I. Recall and Recognition of Prose

Three experiments explored the rate at which amnesic participants' free recall, cued recall, and recognition of prose declined over short filled delays. In Experiment 1, after performance had been matched to that of controls at 15 s, amnesics showed accelerated forgetting over delays of up to 10 min in a free-recall condition, whereas recognition performance declined normally over delays of up to 1 hr. This pattern of results was replicated in Experiment 2, which showed that amnesic rate of forgetting on a test of cued recall was influenced by level of cuing. Experiment 3 showed that excessive sensitivity to interference was unlikely to be the cause of the amnesic patients' accelerated forgetting rate, which is instead explained in terms of storage deficit accounts of amnesia.