Memory for remote events in anterograde amnesia: recognition of public figures from newsphotographs.

Patients with anterograde amnesia, including the case H.M. and a group of alcoholic Korsakov cases, were tested for their prompted and unprompted recognition of public figures who had become famous at various points in time from the 1920's to the 1960's. The comparisons between prompted and unprompted recognition for figures from before and after the onsets of the patients' amnesic syndromes were discussed in relation to competing theories of anterograde amnesia. The results were interpreted as not favoring the strong versions of either a faulty-storage or a faulty-retrieval theory.