ABSTRACT
The question raised in this chapter is a deceptively simple one: What is an amnesic? This is a question that has been debated with considerable vigor, both directly and in many guises, on numerous occasions. Reports from different laboratories testing amnesic subjects are often contradictory, and attempts to synthesize experimental findings are often fated to become a series of limp equivocations, constrained by the failure of researchers to use appropriate and useful criteria for describing their patient sample. At issue in particular is how severity of amnesia should be defined for individual cases, and whether (and how) patients with neurological damage resulting in deficits apart from amnesia should be screened and excluded from amnesic samples. Amnesics are not usually completely devoid of the capacity to learn, and severity of impairment can impact on their performance of experimental tasks. This is illustrated by the findings of Schacter and his colleagues (e.g., Schacter, 1985) that accuracy of memory for new associations, tested using word-completion tasks, is a function of severity of memory loss as assessed by the Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS).
