title: Effects of fixed- and varied-context repetition on associative recognition in amnesia.
abstract: This study compared the effects of fixed- and varied-context repetition on associative recognition in amnesia. Controls and amnesic participants were presented with a set of three-word phrases. Each was presented three times. In the varied-context condition, the verb changed with each presentation; in the fixed-context condition, it remained constant. At test, participants performed an associative-recognition task in which they were shown pairs of words from the study phase and asked to distinguish between intact and recombined pairs. For corrected recognition (hits - false alarms), controls performed better in the varied-context than in the fixed-context repetition condition, whereas amnesic participants' performance did not differ between conditions. Similarly, controls had lower false-alarm rates in the varied-context condition, but there was no significant effect of condition for the amnesic participants. Thus, varied-context repetition does not improve amnesic participants' performance on a recollection-dependent associative-recognition task, possibly because the amnesic participants were unable to take advantage of the additional cues that the varied-context encoding condition provided.
authors.affiliation: Memory Disorders Research Center, VA Boston Healthcare System and Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA 02130, USA. dlg@bu.edu
authors.forename: Daniel L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Greenberg
authors.forename: Mieke
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Verfaellie
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000647:Amnesia / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics