Question

Are patients with anterograde amnesia able to perform visual recognition tasks without difficulty? We assume general visual recognition tasks, no need for a specific task or activity.

Answer 1

Under Anterograde Amnesia patients cannot form new memories. Patients are aware of pre-accident incidents, but can not remember day-to-day details or new facts presented after the injury occurred. However, they can better remember past memories, especially of traumatic events , for example, one patient remembered how he spent time with his mother when he was a baby. He now lives in a residential care home, and can only recall his childhood's first two or three months. Most patients with Anterograde Amnesia learn new information in different ways(visual, auditory, tactile, and numerical) that are integrated, while the information is presented in isolation. Therefore, the patient might believe that after learning a name, the term is somehow part of his physical and emotional identity.
Under Anterograde Amnesia patients can perform visual recognition on a small screen with some degree of accuracy. Patients were trained and taught using three categories of images and words – objects, animals, and other stimuli. The study also assesses how easily participants can perform certain visual recognition tasks. For example, in one experiment, 80-year-old patients with Anterograde Amnesia normally perform two speed-reading passage sets and two fixation-reading passage sets. In this study, learning rate was measured, recall rate was recorded and memory test was performed. It has been found that in patients with anterograde amnesia were able to identify objects.