ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that some of the discrepancies in the literature and the theoretical controversies surrounding them arise from the common belief that amnesia is considered as a single syndrome caused by the malfunction of a single mechanism or process. It focuses on the two most widely studied amnesic syndromes, Korsakoff and temporal-lobe-hippocampal, and shows that despite a general similarity of symptoms, there are important and fundamental differences between them. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that some memory disorders considered central to the amnesic syndrome by many investigators are not primarily associated with amnesia but are actually secondary to frontal and other cortical damage. Three forms of dissociation that have classically attributed to the amnesic syndrome in addition to the dissociation between memory and intelligence they are: the dissociation between primary and secondary memory or between short and long term memory; the dissociation between retrograde and anterograde amnesia; and dissociation between memory and awareness.
