The effects of varying cue-load on amnesic and normal cued recall

The effects of cue-load and cue-type (category and rhyming) on the cued recall of word lists were examined in amnesic and control subjects under conditions where contextual information was either important or superfluous to recall. Results indicated that amnesics were differently impaired compared to controls with increasing levels of cue-load, regardless of cue-type or the importance of contextual information. Amnesics achieved normal recall when cues applied to only one item. The results are interpreted as providing contradictory evidence for the semantic encoding and contextual encoding deficit theories. It is argued that human amnesia may result from a specific, unitary deficit at the cue generation stage of recollection.