Priming arithmetic facts in amnesic patients.
In this study, amnesic patients showed significant repetition priming effects in arithmetic fact retrieval tasks. The results indicate that repetition priming effects in arithmetic depend not on explicit recognition, but on the activation of specific long-term representations of arithmetic facts. Processing dissociations between easy and difficult items suggest that the priming effects results from the stage of fact retrieval and not from peripheral activation. This claim is also supported by encoding and naming tasks, which showed only slight priming effects as compared to the priming found in calculation tasks. Significant priming was found for identical (5 x 6 and 5 x 6) and complement problems (5 x 6 and 6 x 5), the latter showing a smaller magnitude of priming.
Delazer
M
M
Universitätsklinik für Neurologie, Innsbruck, Austria. margarete.delazer@uibk.ac.at
Ewen
P
P
Benke
T
T
D000328:Adult; D000647:Amnesia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011340:Problem Solving; D011930:Reaction Time; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D014706:Verbal Learning