ABSTRACT
The clinical description of amnesic patients is so graphic and clear that it is not surprising that animal workers felt they could extrapolate directly from that description to the laboratory. The patients appear to be unable to learn new material, to store new experiences, even though they need not have any intellectual impairment in tasks not requiring the bridging by memory of more than a minute or two. They are, or at least can be, normal in short-term memory tasks such as digit span or the Brown-Peterson test. Many amnesic patients can remember that they have very poor memory, and it is not a kindness to keep asking them questions about their memory. The first is that the amnesic subject, far from showing more rapid "forgetting/' can, under certain appropriate conditions, display slower "forgetting"; and the persistence of the unforgotten material in turn leads directly to an interference with new learning.
