The major aim of this program is to assess the information processing deficits that underlie the memory deficits of alcoholic Korsakoff patients, chronic alcoholics, and various brain-damage populations (e.g., patients with Huntington's Disease or encephalitis). Patients are being administered a battery of sensory (visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory), memory, encoding, and visuo-spatial tasks. To date, the research findings have shown that the alcoholic Korsakoff patients have a severe impairment in their ability to semantically encode new information and that this deficit contributes to their anterograde amnesia. While chronic alcoholics may share some of the same cognitive deficits as the Korsakoff patients, the memory problems of the other brain-damaged populations may be related to other factors than impairments in sematic encoding. BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: DeLuca, D., Cermak, L. S. and Butters, N. An analysis of Korsakoff patients' recall following varying types of distractor activity. Neuropsychologia. 1975, 13, 271-280. Jones, B., Moskowitz, H. and Butters, N. Olfactory discrimination in alcoholic Korsakoff patients. Neuropsychologia, 1975, 13, 173-179.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter