The Deferred Imitation Task as a Nonverbal Measure of Declarative Memory

We tested amnesic patients, patients with frontal lobe lesions, and control subjects with the deferred imitation task, a nonverbal test used to demonstrate memory abilities in human infants. On day 1, subjects were given sets of objects to obtain a baseline measure of their spontaneous performance o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 1995-08, Vol.92 (16), p.7580-7584
Main Authors: McDonough, Laraine, Mandler, Jean M., McKee, Richard D., Squire, Larry R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Aged
Amnesia
Amnesia - physiopathology
Amnesia - psychology
Behavior
Behavioral neuroscience
Brain
Control groups
Declarative memory
Female
Frontal lobe
Frontal Lobe - injuries
Frontal Lobe - physiopathology
Humans
Infant
Lesions
Male
Mathematical sequences
Memory
Memory - physiology
Mental Recall - physiology
Middle Aged
Neuropsychological Tests
Neuropsychology
Psychology
Wechsler scales
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Summary:We tested amnesic patients, patients with frontal lobe lesions, and control subjects with the deferred imitation task, a nonverbal test used to demonstrate memory abilities in human infants. On day 1, subjects were given sets of objects to obtain a baseline measure of their spontaneous performance of target actions. Then different event sequences were modeled with the object sets. On day 2, the objects were given to the subjects again, first without any instructions to imitate the sequences, and then with explicit instructions to imitate the actions exactly as they had been modeled. Control subjects and frontal lobe patients reproduced the events under both uninstructed and instructed conditions. In contrast, performance by the amnesic patients did not significantly differ from that of a second control group who had the same opportunities to handle the objects but were not shown the modeled actions. These findings suggest that deferred imitation is dependent on the brain structures essential for declarative memory that are damaged in amnesia, and they support the view that infants who imitate actions after long delays have an early capacity for long-term declarative memory.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.92.16.7580