title: A case study of amnesia: exploring a paradigm for new semantic learning and generalization.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of this study was to explore and extend previous findings that training with variant items improves generalization performance on novel semantic sentences in an individual with amnesia.
  
  
  METHODS
  A case study of an individual with severe amnesia, Patient T.E., who participated in an extended training and multiple testing paradigm.
  
  
  METHODS
  Patient T.E. participated in 16 training sessions and eight test sessions on his recognition and recall performance for novel 3-word sentences. Three conditions were compared: No Variance (one version of each sentence studied), Early Variance (three versions of each sentence studied from the onset) and Late Variance (each of three versions of each sentence gradually introduced throughout training). Performance on studied items and semantically related items was evaluated.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Patient T.E. demonstrated better learning for Variance items than No Variance items and better generalization to semantically related items for the Late Variance condition. However, he showed an advantage for the No Variance condition on the recall task.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Gradually introducing the variant items into training may be the optimal strategy for training an individual with severe amnesia to learn and generalize new semantic information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Cognitive Neurology/Neuropsychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. starks@uci.edu
authors.forename: Shauna
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stark
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gordon
authors.forename: Craig
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stark
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000647:Amnesia / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012660:Semantics