Assessment of Retrograde Amnesia: Findings With a New Public Events Procedure

Existing public events tests for retrograde amnesia quickly become out of date and require frequent restandardization. We report the initial development of the Oscar Test, which requires subjects to match the titles of Academy Award winning movies with the years in which they were made, a procedure that updates itself automatically every year. Data from 25 normal subjects and 7 patients with severe anterograde amnesia are presented. As a group, the patients demonstrated significant impairment, misdating movies by an average of 14 years. Several individual amnesic patients were much more impaired and produced profiles similar to those found on other remote memory tests. Performance on the Oscar Test tended to parallel performance on the Autobiographical Memory Interview in revealing mild, time-limited retrograde amnesia in some patients and severe, temporally extensive retrograde amnesia in others. Neuropathology outside the classical memory system may be required for the latter type.