The effect of cuing on release from proactive interference in korsakoff amnesic patients

Korsakoff amnesic and alcoholic control patients were asked to recall successive lists of nine nouns of the same category. The expected progressive decrease in recall was reversed by a category shift on the fifth list for controls but not for amnesics. A context shift on the fifth list (changed color of words and background) led to improved performance by amnesics but not by controls. However, amnesics did show "release from proactive interference" at category shift if it was the second shift in a sequence (on trial nine) or if they were told to expect the shift. These findings relate amnesics' known vulnerability to proactive interference to an impaired use of available cues to segregate new from old material--unless the cues are made additionally salient. This difficulty could operate both during learning and at retrieval.