Memory under anesthesia: Evidence for . response suppreSSIon

The present study evaluated implicit and explicit memory for auditory stimuli in 10 surgical patients. Anesthetized subjects heard sentences that contained low-frequency versions of homophones and infrequent category exemplars. During the postoperative test, subjects (a) produced sentences using the homophones and (b) generated exemplars from conceptual categories. Multiply primed items were generated less often on the test than were singly primed or new (control) items. This outcome suggests the conditioned suppression of information experienced during anesthesia, establishing a possible experimental analogue of clinical repression.