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L S Cermak

Publications and source records attributed to L S Cermak.

70 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1975

Imagery as an aid to retrieval for Korsakoff patients.

Six Korsakoff patients and six alcoholic controls learned a five item P-A task under each of the following three learning conditions; Rote, Imagery, and Cued learning. Under all conditions the Korsakoff patients took more trials to learn than did the control patients. However, both imagery learning and cued learning were easier than rote learning for the Korsakoff patients when recall was used as the learning index. When a recognition measure was used instead of the recall, imagery learning proved easiest with no difference existing between cued and rote learning. In a second experiment, the patients were given the cue (a mediating link) during presentation, but not during retrieval. Under this condition the Korsakoff patients learned no more rapidly than they did by rote regardless which response measure was required. It was concluded that imagery can aid both storage and retrieval of verbal information for Korsakoff patients, while cuing aids only the retrieval process.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed1975

Short-term motor memory in Korsakoff patients.

10 amnesic alcoholic Korsakoff patients were compared with 10 chronic alcoholics for their ability to retain a simple motor movement over either a 10- or 20-sec. interval. During this interval the opportunity for rehearsal was minimized by having the patients engage in either a verbal or a motor distractor task. Under both conditions the Korsakoff patients were impaired relative to the control subjects, with very little difference between the two types of interference. It was concluded that Korsakoff patients have a short-term motor retention deficit that cannot be explained simply as an inability to mediate the task verbally.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Assessment of olfactory deficits in detoxified alcoholics.

Olfactory functioning was evaluated in 37 male detoxified alcoholics and in 21 age-matched nonalcoholic controls using the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT). Of the original subjects, 23 alcoholics and 14 controls returned for reevaluation 3-4 months following initial testing. The results showed that alcoholics had significantly lower UPSIT scores than did the controls, both at baseline and follow-up testing. Thirty-two percent of the alcoholics' UPSIT scores, in comparison to five percent of the controls' scores, fell into the clinically impaired range. Although current smoking patterns correlated significantly with UPSIT indices, comparisons limited to nonsmokers still indicated that the alcoholics were significantly impaired on this olfactory task. Correlational analyses indicated that olfactory performance was unrelated to alcoholics' scores on visuoconceptual and language tasks. Correlations with MR-derived indices of CSF volume showed a highly significant relationship between UPSIT scores and cortical sulcal volumes. Additionally, alcoholics (N = 15) who remained abstinent had significantly higher scores at follow-up than those who were not abstinent (N = 8). These findings demonstrate that alcoholism is associated with basic olfactory impairments which are only partially reversible with abstinence and that cortical structures play an important role in this sensory loss.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Olfactory loss in alcoholics: correlations with cortical and subcortical MRI indices.

The relationship between olfactory identification ability and MRI volumetric indices of specific cortical and subcortical brain regions was investigated in 36 recently detoxified male alcoholics. The results of correlational analyses between MRI indices and score on the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT) revealed that impairment in olfactory identification was associated with elevated cortical and ventricular CSF volumes as well as with reduced tissue volumes in the cortical and subcortical grey matter. The volume of the thalamus was found to be a significant unique predictor of UPSIT score, even after accounting for variance shared with other MRI indices. These findings provide the first empirical support for existing hypotheses that olfactory loss in alcoholic subjects may be mediated by both cortical and subcortical structures.

Alcoholism↗
PubMedDate not supplied

A positive approach to viewing processing deficit theories of amnesia.

This reply is admittedly a defence of the encoding-deficits theory of amnesia. However, it attempts to go further by proposing that this deficit, which was originally designed just to explain amnesics' explicit episodic memory disorder, might be viewed as being but one instance of a more general disorder characteristic of all aspects of amnesic patients' information processing. It is proposed that amnesic patients' inability to perform more consciously controlled conceptual analyses results not only in explicit recall deficits, but sometimes also in instances of below normal implicit memory and recognition ability. Their ability to perform automatic, perceptual-level processing produces normal performance on some implicit and some recognition tasks, but it is not sufficient for all tasks.

Amnesia↗