Biomedical subjects

Katie Page

Publications and source records attributed to Katie Page.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Working memory for conjunctions relies on the medial temporal lobe.

A prominent theory of hippocampal function proposes that the hippocampus is importantly involved in relating or binding together separate pieces of information to form an episodic representation. This hypothesis has only been applied to studies of long-term memory because the paradigmatic view of the hippocampus is that it is not critical for short-term forms of memory. However, relational processing is important in many working memory tasks, especially tasks using visual stimuli. Here, we test the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobes are important for relational memory even over short delays. The task required patients with medial temporal lobe amnesia and controls to remember three objects, locations, or object-location conjunctions over 1 or 8 s delays. The results show that working memory for objects and locations was at normal levels, but that memory for conjunctions was severely impaired at 8 s delays. Additional analyses suggest that the hippocampus per se is critical for accurate conjunction working memory. We propose that the hippocampus is critically involved in memory for conjunctions at both short and long delays.

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PubMed2006

Implicit memory for novel conceptual associations in amnesia.

In two experiments, we evaluated the status of implicit memory for novel associations in amnesia. Experiment 1 assessed priming in a category exemplar generation task in which contextual information associated with a target could increase the likelihood of target generation. Control participants, but not amnesic patients, showed associative priming. Amnesics' impairment was not due to the use of explicit memory by control subjects but reflected a genuine impairment in implicit memory for novel conceptual associations. Experiment 2 assessed priming in a relatednessjudgment task, in which associative priming was manifest as longer latencies for old than for recombined pairs of unrelated words. Amnesic patients showed intact associative priming in this task. We discuss differences in the status of implicit memory for novel conceptual associations in amnesia, with reference to the nature of the representation that supports priming in the two tasks and the type of processing that is required at test.

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PubMed2005

Impaired implicit memory for gist information in amnesia.

In 2 experiments using a converging associates paradigm, the authors evaluated implicit memory for gist information in amnesic patients. In Experiment 1, participants saw multiple sets of associates, each converging on a nonpresented theme word, and were then tested using an implicit word stem completion test and an explicit cued recall test. Amnesic patients showed intact implicit and impaired explicit memory for studied words, but memory for nonpresented lures was impaired, regardless of retrieval instructions. To evaluate whether impaired implicit memory for lures was due to accelerated forgetting of gist information, short study lists were used in Experiment 2, each consisting of a single set of associates. Amnesics' implicit memory for lures was again impaired. These results point to an inability to encode robust gist representations as the cause of impaired gist memory in amnesia.

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