Anterograde amnesia is?

• A. Inability to remember events before trauma
• B. Inability to remember events after trauma
• C. Inability to form new long-term memories
• D. Loss of attention

Answer: (C)

Anterograde amnesia is about encoding new information into memory after the event. The defining issue is the inability to form lasting long-term memories for experiences that occur after the injury, even though a person may hold information briefly in working memory and recall memories from before the event. The hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal structures are key in transferring brief experiences into durable long-term memories, so damage there disrupts that encoding process. Because of this, people with anterograde amnesia can often remember past events (before the trauma) but struggle to create new explicit memories, though some procedural learning may be retained through other brain systems. This makes the option describing an inability to form new long-term memories the best description of the condition.