1. Retrograde Amnesia Loss of memory for events and information that occurred before the onset of the memory disorder. Motivated Forgetting Caused by personal crisis. Individual oriented to time and place but not identity. Either fails to recall identity or confabulates false identity. Organic Retrograde Amnesia Caused by brain injury. Individual not oriented to time and place.

2. Psychogenic Amnesia Motivated Forgetting: Also known as fugue state. Caused by personal crisis. Individual oriented to time and place but not identity. Either fails to recall identity or confabulates false identity. The case of A.T. (Kopelman, Christensen, Puffett, and Stanhope - 1994). Evidence to suggest that memory for identity was not lost. Very rare and tends to be associated with dishonest activity.

3. Organic Retrograde Amnesia Caused by brain injury. Individual not oriented to time and place. Individual does remember identity.

4. Causes of Retrograde Amnesia Depression. May be cured by drug or ECT. Shock/trauma May also be temporary. Return of memory is disorganized. Evidence that episodic memories may be stored in sequence in adjacent locations in the brain. Disease. Disease effects are chronic or progressive. Retrograde amnesia also a component of Korsakoff’s syndrome, Huntington’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.

5. Korsakoff’s Syndrome Korsakoff patients are compared with normal controls on a lifetime retrieval test scaled to give a flat function. The more recent the memory the less likely it is to be retrieved.

6. Retrograde Amnesia As Retrieval Failure Butters (1984): Case of P.Z., Korsakoff patient. Wrote autobiography 3 years before onset of disorder. Failure to recall recent memories that were described in autobiography shows the failure to be a result of retrieval rather than insufficient learning (encoding).

7. Frontal Lobe Damage Frontal lobe damage is associated with: Confabulation. Remembering (and believing) false events. Dangerous behavior. Patient can act on the basis of delusions. Degree of impairment is proportional to the amount of frontal lobe damage.