RESEARCH ARTICLE Long-Term Recency in Anterograde Amnesia Deborah Talmi1,2*, Jeremy B. Caplan3,4, Brian Richards5, Morris Moscovitch1,3 1 Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2 School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, 3 Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 4 Psychology Department and Centre for Neuroscience, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 5 Department of Psychology, Baycrest Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada *
[email protected] Abstract Amnesia is usually described as an impairment of a long-term memory (LTM) despite an in- tact short-term memory (STM). The intact recency effect in amnesia had supported this view. Although dual-store models of memory have been challenged by single-store models based on interference theory, this had relatively little influence on our understanding and treatment of amnesia, perhaps because the debate has centred on experiments in the neu- OPEN ACCESS rologically intact population. Here we tested a key prediction of single-store models for free Citation: Talmi D, Caplan JB, Richards B, recall in amnesia: that people with amnesia will exhibit a memory advantage for the most re- Moscovitch M (2015) Long-Term Recency in cent items even when all items are stored in and retrieved from LTM, an effect called long- Anterograde Amnesia. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0124084. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124084 term recency. People with amnesia and matched controls studied, and then free-recalled, word lists with a distractor task following each word, including the last (continual distractor Academic Editor: Efthimios M. C. Skoulakis, Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research task, CDFR).