Did H.M. exhibit accelerated long-term forgetting? Measuring forgetting in amnesia

Abstract

The early investigations of patient H.M. inaugurated the modern era of memory research. During the 1970s and 1980s, a key debate over whether H.M. with bilateral medial temporal lobe lesions exhibited accelerated long-term forgetting attracted an increasing interest in forgetting research among amnestic patients. Huppert and Piercy (1979) examined H.M.’s performance in visual recognition at 10-minute, 1-day, and 7-day intervals and suggested that H.M. was subjected to rapid forgetting compared with Korsakoff patients and healthy participants reported in Huppert and Piercy (1978). In contrast, Freed et al. (1987) employed the same experimental paradigm and concluded that forgetting rates in H.M. did not differ from those in healthy controls. These incompatible findings highlighted a methodological challenge in measuring forgetting in the cross-group comparison design, where closely equalising the initial performance between patient and control groups is usually suggested. The re-analysis in this viewpoint, using both linear- and nonlinear-based modelling, reconciled the discrepancy between the aforementioned studies. Our results indicated that the rate of forgetting in H.M. did not differ from that in healthy controls, regardless of whether the initial performance was closely matched. Here, we suggest that the cross-group comparisons in forgetting studies do not necessarily seek a perfect match in initial performance unless the risks of confounding encoding and retrieval processes can be effectively controlled.