Acquisition and transfer of new verbal information in amnesia: Retrieval and neuroanatomical constraints

Four experiments examined new associative learning in amnesia by contrasting the performance of 2 amnesic participants - 1 (C.C.) with basal forebrain damage and the other (R.H.) with medial temporal lobe damage - and 3 controls. Both amnesic individuals were severely impaired on explicit memory measures but showed intact perceptual priming. On the new associations measures, only C.C., not R.H., exhibited learning by producing correct targets (HIJACKER) in the absence of perceptual cues for them (e.g., STAFF shot). When the perceptual cue (e.g., MEDICINE cured I C P) was provided, both C.C. and R.H. showed learning. Transfer to information containing conceptually related targets (e.g., TERRORIST or BELCH) was reliably observed only in C.C. This finding was replicated with further reduction in perceptual overlap across original (LIGHTNING torched JUNGLE) and transfer (LIGHTNING burned WILDERNESS) sentences. Together, these findings delineate the role of experimental conditions, severity of amnesia, and different neuroanatomical structures in mediating new verbal learning in amnesia.