Differential patterns of memory loss in patients with Alzheimer's disease and Korsakoff's disease.

Patients with Korsakoff's disease or the likely diagnosis of Alzheimer's dementia were tested on various mnemonic tasks and the results compared to the performance of alcoholic or normal controls. The experimental outcome indicates similar perceptual learning processes of Alzheimer and Korsakoff subjects. On the other hand, both groups of patients showed a somewhat different pattern of episodic memory loss, and a different proportion of intrusion and omission errors in the learning of semantically related words. The results are discussed with respect to some neuropathological and neuropsychological sequelae.