Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The fragmentation model of associative memory has the attraction of specifying neither a spatial metaphor nor a symbolic representation for remembering. It was used in order to compare the recall of groups of unrelated words by amnesic and normal people. Similarly, a schema model was used in order to compare their recall of groups of related words. It was found that the impairment in remembering with amnesia revealed by these models was remarkably uniform rather than selective. This suggests that the level at which the memory storage system is damaged in amnesia is a relatively low one. In a connectionist formulation, this would presumably correspond to widespread random damage to units and the connections between them.