A police officer is shot in a gun battle with bank robbers. Although emergency brain surgery saves his life, it leaves him unable to store new information. The officer’s family is applying to the state for compensation for his injuries. When asked to provide a diagnosis of the difficulties he suffers, what will they write?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The scenario describes a police officer who, after brain surgery, cannot store new information. This specific deficit is characteristic of anterograde amnesia, where new memories fail to form while long-term memories from before the event may remain intact.
Option 1: retroactive amnesia. This would involve difficulty recalling memories formed after a certain event, which is not what the vignette describes; the issue is with forming new memories going forward, not with memories formed after the incident.
Option 2: retrograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia refers to loss of pre-existing memories prior to some event, not the inability to create new ones, so it does not fit the situation.
Option 3: proactive amnesia. Proactive amnesia is not a standard clinical term used to describe memory impairment; it would imply difficulties due to old information interfering with new learning, which again does not match the described deficit.
Option 4: anterograde amnesia. This option directly matches the described problem—difficulty storing or forming new information after the injury, while older memories may be preserved. Therefore, the diagnosis reflects anterograde amnesia.

Similar Questions

Patient H.M. is most well-known because he lost the ability to form .

Henry Molaison, also known as Patient H. M., underwent brain surgery, removing portions of the hippocampus on both sides of his brain, to stop severe epileptic seizures. What happened to his memory as a result of the surgery?

An impairment in learning novel (new) information is most likely to be associated with…

The famous patient H.M. had portions of his medial temporal lobes removed bilaterally to treat his severe epilepsy. This surgery led to which of the following conditions?

In the case study of H.M., what was the key finding regarding his memory after bilateral medial temporal lobectomy?

Anterograde amnesia is said to occur when memory is lost for events that occurred prior to the occurrence of the amnesia.

Which of the following is an example of anterograde amnesia?

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