ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the original neuropsychological investigation of memory disorders and the some experiments derive directly from this formulation of the organization of memory systems. It investigates the original experiment on the Brown-Peterson task in a new group of severely amnesic patients, and uses the same paradigm, to manipulate the short-term (ST) and long-term (LT) components of the task. The chapter shows that there is an inverse relationship between increasing the LT component and the performance of amnesic patients. The effects compared both directly and indirectly with the performance of patients with STM deficits. The plausible interpretation of the experiments the chapter has presented and the previous experiments has reviewed is that the distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory systems has both functional and structural validity. The performance of STM patients is severely impaired on the Brown-Peterson task whereas it is normal in a small proportion of amnesic patients, namely those most probably free from widespread cerebral involvement.
