One of the defining characteristics of Korsakoff syndrome is anterograde amnesia, or the inability to acquire new information. Although Korsakoff patients generally show preserved memory for new semantic information under certain conditions, the episodic detail associating that information with its origin, such as when and where the learning took place, is impaired. The reconstruction of memory for the origin, or source, of an event requires the retrieval of different types of memory details, as well as the evaluation of those details. The process of reconstructing source from the retrieval and evaluation of memory detail is called source monitoring.
Characteristics of source monitoring theory have been described for healthy adults and several specific populations. However, source monitoring performance in Korsakoff patients has not previously been evaluated. The primary goals of the present investigation were to: (a) determine if Korsakoff patients showed impairment in source monitoring as compared to healthy adults, (b) distinguish the specific types of source monitoring processes in which Korsakoff patients differed from healthy adults, (c) differentiate changes in performance when source monitoring cues are manipulated, and (d) describe the misattribution biases made by Korsakoff patients as compared to healthy adults and previous studies of clinical populations.
The results of this investigation provided evidence that Korsakoff patients did show impairment in source monitoring performance. Additionally, the specific source monitoring failures shown by Korsakoff patients suggest that certain failures may be related to normal forgetting or frontal lobe impairment. However, some characteristics of source monitoring performance seem to be unique to Korsakoff patients. As the present set of experiments describes an initial investigation of source monitoring performance in Korsakoff patients, suggestions for extended investigation are proposed.