The effect of electroconvulsive shock on memory.

This review of the literature on the affects of electroconvulsive shock (ECS) on memory will first attend briefly to three originally distinct lines of development which occasionally overlap, and eventually converge in the first publication (Cerletti and Bini, 1938) concerning the use of ECS with human subjects. It will then go on to deal with the literature on ECS and will pay special attention to the affect of ECS on memory when it is interpolated between learning and a retention test. Use of ECS for the study of memory and retention seems to be the result of three quite separate lines of thinking. Two of these are somewhat less important now: the idea, which has lasted for several centuries, that shock or stress of any kind is useful in treatment of mental illness; and a long-standing biological interest in the effects of electricity on the animal body. The third line, much more recent in origin and also more germane to our present concerns, involves the fusion of ideas about retrograde amnesia and retroactive inhibition in the theory of the consolidation period in learning