22 Facts About Kent Cochrane

In 1981, Cochrane was involved in a motorcycle accident that left him with severe anterograde amnesia, as well as temporally graded retrograde amnesia.

Kent Cochrane was born on August 5,1951, as the oldest of five children.

In October 1981, Kent Cochrane was involved in a single-vehicle accident on his way home from his job at a manufacturing plant when the motorcycle he was riding veered off of an exit ramp.

Kent Cochrane had severe injury to his medial temporal lobes, along with almost complete bilateral hippocampal loss.

Neuropathologically, Kent Cochrane suffered from both anterograde amnesia and temporally graded retrograde amnesia.

The trauma caused by Kent Cochrane's accident left him with severe anterograde amnesia that has made it impossible for him to remember both new personal experiences and semantic information.

Kent Cochrane died in his room at an assisted living facility where he lived and the family opted not to authorize an autopsy.

Studies on Kent Cochrane have provided researchers with information on various topics in neuroscience.

Implications of Kent Cochrane's neuropathology have shown that damage to specific regions of the brain is associated with different forms of memory loss.

Priming studies on Kent Cochrane revealed that individuals with severe amnesia can display intact priming capabilities regardless of episodic memory damage.

Kent Cochrane additionally showed that priming effects can last for long periods of time; in one study, researchers presented Kent Cochrane with a list of words, and after 12 months showed him the same words with letters missing.

Kent Cochrane was able to complete these fragmented words as successfully as a person with normal brain function who was shown the same list initially.

Studies on Kent Cochrane illuminated the relationship between semantic learning and episodic memory, showing that patients with severe amnesia are capable of retaining new semantic knowledge in the absence of episodic memory.

Researchers found that Kent Cochrane was able to learn new semantic knowledge and retain it over a long period of time.

Kent Cochrane showed significant retention of this semantic knowledge, completing 25 of the 64 sentences.

Research on Patient Kent Cochrane led to greater understanding of priming in amnesics.

Episodic and semantic memory are therefore described as showing stochastic independence, ruling out the idea that Kent Cochrane was able to retain information because certain words were of greater significance to him than others.

Studies on Kent Cochrane's semantic learning provided insight into the conditions that are necessary to promote successful semantic learning in amnesic patients.

One study showed that Kent Cochrane could learn vocabulary associated with operating a desktop computer; further studies revealed that Kent Cochrane could actually learn commands related to computers to the extent that he was able to perform basic programming tasks on a microcomputer.

Kent Cochrane's learning of this more complex information was hyperspecific.

Similarly, if the command instructions he had learned were slightly changed, Kent Cochrane was unable to perform the programming tasks.

Nevertheless, Kent Cochrane showed that severe anterograde amnesia does not restrict individuals from retaining knowledge that is more complex than information learned from priming.