ABSTRACT
PB showed a remarkable capacity to retain new episodic long-term memories, provided that sensory input was minimal after acquisition. This finding challenges the traditional model of amnesia and has led to the novel hypothesis that some types of amnesia might be caused by an interruption of memory consolidation via ongoing sensory input. Psychologists working within the domain of long-term memory mainly manipulated memory encoding and retrieval to establish the critical conditions for memory persistence, example, context dependency and depth of encoding. Hardly anyone had manipulated the interval between encoding and retrieval, who coined the term consolidation, and researchers examining the effect of sleep on memory. The research on PB and other patients has changed the status quo to some extent, by reigniting the interest in consolidation sparked by a psychologist 117 years ago, and by fuelling novel, cross-disciplinary research on memory consolidation.
