| Abstract: | H. Jackson's concepts of nervous functions, implying that anesthetics first obliterate more recently developed functions, were applied to interpreting the effects of low concentrations of anesthetics on mnemonic functions in 4 experiments with 27 young adult males. It was proposed that there should be concentrations at which anesthetics affect verbal memory, sparing nonverbal visual memory, and Ss should show more acoustic than semantic confusions in long-term memory. These hypotheses were confirmed in Ss inhaling very low anesthetic concentrations and in Ss recovering from inhalation of high anesthetic concentrations. Nonverbal acoustic memory was also impaired, but not as much as verbal memory. At relatively higher concentrations, long-term registration of verbal material was abolished, leaving only short-term capacities. The data also provide independent evidence for separation of verbal and nonverbal memory and for acoustic processing of visually presented verbal material. (25 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
