Anterograde amnesia is a form of amnesia, or memory loss, where new events are not transferred to long-term memory. After the onset of the disorder, the sufferer will not be able to remember anything that occurs after his attention is shifted away from one subject for more than a few seconds.
Those who suffer from theoretically pure anterograde amnesia will still be able to remember memories laid down before the onset of anterograde amnesia, but will exist in a transient world where anything beyond their immediate attention-span disappears permanently from their consciousness. In reality, anterograde amnesia i ...
The most famous case of anterograde amnesia is that of HM or Henry M., the man whose lesions accidentally started the inquiry into the neurobiology of learning and memory.
Oliver Sacks characterizes two individuals with anterograde amnesia in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Both suffer from Korsakoff's Syndrome, which causes irreversible anterograde amnesia. The story of one patient is called "The Lost Mariner": he began forgetting everything from the end of WWII and felt certain that the date was constantly 19 ...
Schemas are an extremely effective (but flawed) tool for understanding the world. Through the use of schemas, most everyday situations do not require effortful thought — automatic thought is all that is required. People can quickly organize new perceptions into schemas and act effectively without effort. For example, most people have a stairway schema, and can apply it to climb staircases they've never seen before.
However, schemas can influence and hamper the uptake of new information (proactive interference), such as when existing ...
The original concept of schemas (NB: in reality the plural of 'schema' is 'schemata') is linked with that of Reconstructive Memory as proposed and demonstrated in a series of experiments by Bartlett (1932). By presenting participants with information that was unfamiliar to their cultural backgrounds and expectations and then monitoring how they recalled these different items of information (stories etc), Bartlett was able to establish that individuals' existing schemata and stereotypes influence not only how they interpret 'schema-foreign' n ...
