Abstract
We developed a new direct priming task, which contains high familiarity words and low familiarity words, and we perfomed this task to the normal controls (C group), the patients with alcoholics (A group) and the patients with alcohol Korsakoff syndrome (K group )in 30 minutes and 1 week after the presentation of the primer words. Every group demonstrated the priming effects and the priming effect of low familiarity words was larger than that of high familiarity words in C group and A group. The priming effect of high familiarity task demonstrated no statistical differences among C group, A group and K group. However, the priming effect of low familiarity task revealed significantly smaller in K group compared with that in C group and A group. The priming effect was reduced in 1 week in high familiarity task although there was not a significant reduce in low familiarity task. Furthermore, the patients answered correctly in some of the present direct priming task without understanding the meaning of words, suggesting that other factors besides meaning of the words are related to the direct priming effects.
