"More on recognition and recall in amnesics": Correction to Hirst, Johnson, Phelps, and Volpe (1988).

Reports an error in "More on recognition and recall in amnesics" by William Hirst, Marcia K. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Phelps and Bruce T. Volpe (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1988[Oct], Vol 14[4], 758-762). In this article, the authors failed to specify how the group of amnesics that they test in their article differed from the nonalcoholic amnesics tested in Hirst, Johnson, Kim, Phelps, Risse, and Volpe (1986). The pertinent statistics are given in the erratum. Additionally, in the last sentence on page 760, the degrees of freedom for the t test should be 8 instead of 10. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1989-16104-001.) Hirst et al. (1986) reported that amnesic forced-choice recognition was relatively preserved when compared with amnesic recall. They equated normal recognition and amnesic recognition by extending exposure time for the amnesics and then comparing amnesic recall and normal recall. Amnesic recall was worse than normal recall, despite equated recognition. We conducted two experiments to extend that result. Experiment 1 established that the findings of Hirst et al. are not paradigm specific and hold when amnesic recognition and normal recognition are equated by increasing the retention interval for normals. In Experiment 2 we further established the generality of the result by examining yes-no recognition. Findings further specify the selective nature of the direct memory deficits in amnesics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)