Anesthesia Awareness - Cognitive Psychologists Study Memory Under Anesthesia

Cognitive Psychologists Study Memory Under Anesthesia

A number of mainstream cognitive psychologists have studied memory as a basic cognitive process under anesthesia.

Dr. John F. Kihlstrom of the University of California, Berkeley is one such cognitive psychologists and he has contributed to a book on consciousness with a chapter on anesthesia.

Dr. Chantal Kerssens of Emory University in Atlanta was trained as a cognitive psychologist (MS, PhD). Her research interests have been in memory function during anesthesia, in particular its relation to depth of sedation.1 She can be observed in a video lecture whose topic is: Neuroimaging Anesthetic Effect on Brain Networks. 2

Professor Jackie Andrade of the Applied Psychology Group at University of Plymouth, U.K. has a special interest in “Priming and awareness during anaesthesia”. 3 An abstract of an article she has written with a title “Unconscious memory formation during anaesthesia” can be assessed from the footnote link. 4

Dr. Phil Merikle, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada has written and published on the subject of “Memory and Anaesthesia”.5 He coauthored an influential meta-analysis article in this area in 1996 in a journal entitled Consciousness and Cognition.6

Dr. Daniel L. Schacter former Chair, Department of Psychology, Harvard University 7 has been actively concerned with this topic since at least 1990, when he published a book chapter entitled: “Anesthesia, amnesia, and the cognitive unconscious”. In the same year he published a journal article entitled “Implicit and Explicit Memory Following Surgical Anesthesia”. 8