Memory for source after traumatic brain injury

A fame judgment task was used to distinguish subjects' ability to recognize previously presented information from their ability to recognize the source of that information. Traumatic brain injured (TBI) subjects were impaired relative to controls with respect to verbal recall and recognition as well as memory for source. However, memory for source was demonstrated to be independent of explicit indices of recall and recognition ability. It was also found to be an extremely sensitive index of coma duration in the TBI subjects. The anticipated relationship between source memory and a putative index of frontal function (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) was modest relative to the relationship between source memory and subjects' performance on a complex visual pattern matching task (Benton Facial Recognition), raising questions about hypothesized cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying memory for source.