A review of theories of human amnesia

Six theories of human amnesia are examined. Each is categorized according to the processing ability that is conceived to underlie the amnesic deficit. The theories fall into one of four categories: consolidation, retrieval, semantic encoding, and context encoding deficit theories. The recently proposed context encoding deficit theories are found to offer the most satisfactory account of the human amnesic syndrome. It is suggested that the other theoretical approaches are best viewed as special cases of these context encoding deficit theories.