People may be more susceptible to hypnotic amnesia if the words they are asked to forget (or remember) have significant emotional connotations.
[3] To study this phenomenon, Lewis and colleagues (1969) taught rats a simple passive avoidance task, a fear-aggravated test used to evaluate learning and memory in rodent models.
The results of this study showed that only the rats unfamiliar with the task demonstrated selective amnesia 24 hours later.
[3] In an experiment investigating the functional role of the entorhinal cortex entorhinal cortex pars medialis in memory formation, Hölscher and Schmidt (1994) found that they could produce selective amnesia for specific types of memories by creating lesions that is painful in the brains of rats.
They also found that lesion-ed rats had a more difficult time finding the food when it was moved to a different arm.
[4] Watanabe and Yanagisawa (2000) found that the serial position effect may determine the task's susceptibility to selective amnesia.
Their findings suggest that scopolamine may contain a property which plays a role in selective amnesia, specifically as it relates to serial positioning.
[6] It has been suggested that inducing selective amnesia for particular events or stimuli in patients may be an effective tool in psychotherapy.
This hypothesis states that the most decisive effect of ECT is the arousal of the active defensive operations in the brain.
They discovered that clustering related information together during initial learning may play a significant role in memory recall.
[9] In another experiment, Davidson and Bower (1991) found that participants with selective amnesia due to hypnosis were able to remember all non-amnesic information with near perfect recall.
These results suggest that people experiencing hypnosis are still able to attend to important retrieval cues even though they are not able to recall the material specifically targeted by the amnesia.
[11] In these studies, selective amnesia is defined as the phenomena experienced when a participant pays attention to the information given but then almost immediately forgets it.
Rodrigues found that inattention blindness, attention capture, and selective amnesia all played a role in the participant's overall accuracy.
[11] Because of the relative rarity of naturally occurring clinical selective amnesia, many case studies have been undertaken to learn more about the cause and course of the disorder.
This brain damage resulted in a slight decrease in cognitive and physical skills as well as a change in personality.
Due to his injury, he developed severe selective amnesia for the people and dates associated with both personal and public events.