Use of mnemonics by alcoholic amnesics

Abstract

18 alcoholic amnesics and 18 alcoholic non-amnesics were tested for the retention and recall of paired-associates (PA's) under a no-instruction condition (NI), a visual imagery condition (VI, ie., told to imagine a picture of the two words in some kind of interaction together), and a verbal mediation condition (VM, ie., told to think of a sentence linking the two words together). The results showed that the use of mnemonics led to a significantly better performance than the baseline condition. Overall, VI seems to be the most effective technique in facilitating the storage and retrieval of verbal information for all subjects.