What is the performance outcome of amnesic patients on the digit span task?

Amnesic patients typically exhibit a reduction in the primacy effect when performing tasks like the digit span. This is due to their impaired ability to encode information into long-term memory, which is crucial for recalling items that were presented earlier in a sequence. The digit span task often involves repeating back a series of numbers in the order presented.

In a normal population, individuals tend to remember the first few items on a list better than the middle items—a phenomenon known as the primacy effect, which occurs because those items have had more opportunity to be processed and transferred to long-term memory. However, for amnesic patients, this encoding process is disrupted, leading to difficulties with consolidating the first few digits into memory. As a result, they are less likely to recall these items compared to non-amnesic individuals, thereby showing a marked reduction in the primacy effect.

Instead of exhibiting patterns like enhanced recency effects or better performance compared to non-amnesics, the impact of their memory impairment is most clearly observed in their struggle with early items in a list, affirming the reduction in their ability to utilize long-term memory effectively.