A positive approach to viewing processing deficit theories of amnesia

Abstract

This reply is admittedly a defence of the encoding-deficits theory of amnesia. However, it attempts to go further by proposing that this deficit, which was originally designed just to explain amnesics' explicit episodic memory disorder, might be viewed as being but one instance of a more general disorder characteristic of all aspects of amnesic patients' information processing. It is proposed that amnesic patients' inability to perform more consciously controlled conceptual analyses results not only in explicit recall deficits, but sometimes also in instances of below normal implicit memory and recognition ability. Their ability to perform automatic, perceptual-level processing produces normal performance on some implicit and some recognition tasks, but it is not sufficient for all tasks.