Further characterization of patients with amnesia after cardiac arrest: preserved recognition memory.

Overview

We observed that patients with amnesia after cardiac arrest had preserved recognition memory despite profound loss of recall memory. In the present study, rate of forgetting was measured in six amnesic subjects for both recall and recognition memory of verbal material. The data show that recall decayed significantly faster for the amnesic subjects than for controls, whereas the rate of forgetting for recognition memory was comparable in both groups. Dissociation between recall and recognition performance is a feature of the amnesic syndrome after cardiac arrest.