Abstract
Electric shock therapy is one of the therapies that is being used currently in the treatment of mental disease. The technic utilized at the New York State Psychiatric Institute has been described 1 and the exact procedure together with the clinically observed sequelae were carefully noted. One of the most striking psychological concomitants of this treatment is the characteristic impairment of the patient's memory.
In order to obtain objective evidence of the degree of memory impairment, it was determined to teach 10 patients a series of tasks before treatment and note the influence of the treatment on the retention of this material.
The materials used in this experiment were paired word associates composed of common household commodities like sugar or coffee paired with pseudo-brand names consisting of two-syllabled nonsense material.
A week before treatment was begun the patient was given a control series consisting of a learning session in the morning followed by a retention test in the afternoon. The criterion of success was 2 consecutive correct repetitions. During the shock week the same procedure was followed on the shock days (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) as well as on the alternate non-shock days. At the end of the course of treatment, several of the patients were given a post-treatment series of tests.
Results. The effect of shock on memory was analyzed in accordance with the 3 methods available for testing retention: relearning, recall and recognition. The data for each patient were analyzed separately and after the consistency of the individual results was established they were combined. When no shock intervenes between learning and relearning, the number of trials saved is significant when compared to its standard error. However, when a shock is interepolated between learning and relearning, there is no significant saving, and indeed there is a slight, but non-significant loss. It should be noted, however, that learnig ability is no poorer after shock than before shock.
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