Source Amnesia - Prevention

Prevention

Research suggests that source amnesia results from poor memory encoding of a particular context opposed to poor retrieval of a context specific memory, except within the case of amnesiacs. This is because content must be encoded along with context in order for the two to be integrated into memory. Since poor encoding may be responsible for source amnesia, it is not likely that a person will be able to retrieve a specific source memory in the future if it was not properly encoded. This makes it difficult to create treatments for source amnesia because the information may not be integrated properly within the brain. Certain prevention strategies have been studied in order to target at-risk populations and teach them how to prevent the loss of contextual memory as well as how to improve source memory in the general population.