The researchers used AB’s résumé to pick passages (with an average length of 46.4 words) from 27 stage plays. During a public meeting in 2005, he suffered a cardiac incident which resulted in hypoxic brain damage to the medial temporal and thalamic structures at the time of testing in 2006, AB showed severe memory impairment.
#Treating amnesia professional#
Patient AB was a professional actor of major prominence who had performed in plays, films, and television programs. The ability to test an amnesiac patient whose real-world profession involved learning and recalling complex material presented an opportunity for the researchers to engage in a more robust test of learning in amnesia.
The patients’ success was interpreted as supporting the notion of learning aided by the anterior/inferior/lateral temporal lobe neocortex.Ĭriticisms of these studies include the fact that they employed very simple tasks and that the learning was demonstrated through forced-choice tasks, cued recall, or familiarity judgments rather than through free recall. In these studies, patients, despite their amnesia, were able to learn items such as three-word sentences, word–picture associations, famous names and faces, and household objects.
In the past 15 years, several studies have examined the impact of hippocampal and medial temporal damage on the learning of semantic information - information relating to general facts and meaning.
In a recent study in the journal Cortex, researchers Michael Kopelman (Kings College London) and John Morton (University College London) used the unique experiences of an actor with amnesia to better understand learning in individuals affected by the syndrome. Actors are a group of people rife for research opportunities because their profession requires that they remember vast amounts of ever-changing information - and recite that information at a moment’s notice.
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