Impaired short-term memory and intact temporal memory in amnesic patients

The continual-distractor paradigm was used to investigate the recency effect in amnesic patients. Amnesics' recall displayed normal recency effects in lists ranging from 18 to 60 sec long. In contrast, overall recall was impaired compared to normals in all lists and across all positions, including the final position. These findings dissociate the recency effect from overall levels of recall. Performance by the controls suggests that the amnesic patients performed worse overall due to an inability to benefit from rehearsal. Current theorizing about the recency effect suggests that amnesics' normal recency effect may be evidence of an ability to encode and retrieve temporally-associated information.