Automatic memory processes in patients with multiple sclerosis
J. Grafman, S. Rao, L. Bernardin and G. J. Leo
Cognitive Neuroscience Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892.
To better understand the nature of the memory deficit in patients with
multiple sclerosis, we designed a study to compare automatic vs effortful
memory processes. Forty-one patients with definite multiple sclerosis and
45 demographically matched normal control subjects were administered two
tasks designed to assess both automatic (monitoring frequency and modality)
and effortful (free and cued-recall) processing. Results indicated that
patients with multiple sclerosis, as expected, were significantly impaired
on memory measures requiring effort, but performed normally on automatic
measures. Performance on the memory indexes did not correlate with
self-reported depression. The implications of these findings for
delineating the locus of the memory impairment in multiple sclerosis is
discussed.
