Amnesic patients' impaired category exemplar production priming

Citation
Ls. Cermak et Bm. Wong, Amnesic patients' impaired category exemplar production priming, J INT NEURO, 4(6), 1998, pp. 576-583
Citations number
10
Language
INGLESE
art.tipo
Article
Categorie Soggetti
Neurology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY
ISSN journal
1355-6177 → ACNP
Volume
4
Issue
6
Year of publication
1998
Pages
576 - 583
Database
ISI
SICI code
1355-6177(199811)4:6<576:APICEP>2.0.ZU;2-G
Abstract
This study examined the effect of varying the number of potential target wo rds on amnesic patients' category exemplar production performance. In Exper iment 1, 4 words from each of 6 categories were presented to amnesic patien ts and normal control participants. This was followed by an indirect task i n which each participant produced the first 8 words that came to mind when presented with a category cue. On this task the amnesic patients were impai red. This outcome stands in sharp contrast to most other category exemplar production tasks that have been reported. However, these other paradigms te nd to restrict participants' processing during target item presentation whi le our procedure allowed them to analyze the target words as they chose. Ou r procedure may have allowed the control participant more opportunity to "c luster" target words from the same category during list presentation and th is, in turn, may have given them an advantage at the time of category exemp lar production. Therefore, in Experiment 2, only 1 word per category was pr esented in the target list and only 2 words per category were requested dur ing category exemplar production. Surprisingly, the amnesic patients still exhibited impaired performance. Therefore, it was suggested that perhaps am nesic patients' known inability to perform semantic levels of processing du ring individual target word presentation may have resulted in impaired prim ing for categorical features for these patients.