Retrograde Amnesia is best described as a deficit in memory retrieval for memories before the injury.

• A. Deficit in memory retrieval for memories prior to the injury
• B. Inability to form new memories after the injury
• C. Loss of memory for events after the injury
• D. Inability to recall memories after a period of sleep

Answer: (A)

Retrograde amnesia means you have trouble retrieving memories that were formed before the brain injury. The core idea is accessing older, pre-injury information rather than learning new things after the injury. In many cases you can still form new memories, but you struggle to bring back memories from the time just before the trauma, and sometimes the older memories are spared. A key nuance is the typical gradient: more recent pre-injury memories are often more affected than distant ones, while remote memories tend to be preserved. This contrasts with anterograde amnesia, where the problem is creating and consolidating new memories after the injury. The other descriptions point to different patterns—difficulty forming new memories after the injury is a hallmark of anterograde amnesia, forgetting post-injury events can resemble post-traumatic forgetting but does not define retrograde amnesia, and forgetting memories specifically after sleep isn’t a standard amnesia type.