ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a case study of focal retrograde amnesia (FRA) resulting from closed head injury. Before assessing the implications of this case study for neuropsychological and neuroanatomical theories of memory, a diagnosis of psychogenic amnesia had to be considered. Only partial degradation is a pertinent feature of current theories of memory as a distributed system. Although DH’s imagery abilities may be related to his quality of post-morbid recall, it is unlikely that such a mild imagery impairment could account for the complete absence of pre-morbid episodic memory. FRA refers to the presence of a remote memory deficit in the absence of an anterograde deficit, or where the anterograde deficit is considered to be minimal. As a clinical phenomenon, FRA is intriguing because information from the pre-morbid period cannot be recalled, yet new information can be successfully encoded and retrieved. The study of DH has provided us with valuable information about FRA.
