Encoding strategies and recognition of faces by alcoholic korsakoff and other brain-damaged patients

Abstract

The present study assessed whether the alcoholic Korsakoff patients' impairment in the recognition of unfamiliar faces is related to a failure in stimulus analysis. Patients with alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome, patients with Huntington's Disease, patients with right-hemisphere damage and normal control subjects were administered a face recognition task under three experimental conditions that presumably induced different levels of stimulus analysis. The recognition scores of the Korsakoff patients, but not those of the other two patient groups, improved significantly following a “high level” orientation task requiring the subjects to judge the likeability of the to-be-remembered faces. Under baseline conditions (i.e., no orientation task), normal controls appeared spontaneously to encode faces in a manner induced by the “high level” task, whereas the Korsakoff patients, left to their own devices, employed strategies consistent with the “low level” orientation task (judgment of nose size). Although these findings seem to support the limited encoding hypothesis, explanations stressing the role of affective-motivational factors cannot be dismissed.