Affective-Arousal Factors in the Recall of Thematic Stories by Amnesic and Demented Patients

The role of affective-arousal factors in alcoholic Korsakoff and Huntington's Disease (HD) patients' ability to recall prose passages was examined. Four types of emotionally toned stories (i.e., neutral, happy, sad, sexual) were read to these patients, and they were asked for an immediate and delayed (after a 30-sec distractor task) recall of each story. The results confirmed a previous report that Korsakoff patients' immediate recall of prose passages was facilitated by sexual themes. Not only did a higher proportion of the Korsakoffs' total recall emanate from the sexual than from the sad, happy, or neutral stories, but also the proportion of sexual material recalled was much greater for the Korsakoff patients than for the HD patients and intact controls. In addition, both the normal control subjects and HD patients evidenced little forgetting between the immediate and delayed recall conditions, whereas the Korsakoff patients demonstrated a rapid and equivalent rate of forgetting for all three story types. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the memory disorders of HD patients are characterized by retrieval deficits, and they also suggest that affective-arousal factors may have significant effects upon amnesic Korsakoff patients' immediate performance although remaining of little consequence for their actual learning (i.e., storage) capacities.