Final answer:
Dissociative amnesia primarily affects autobiographical memory, hindering a person's ability to recall personal past events, while procedural memory usually remains unaffected.
Step-by-step explanation:
Dissociative amnesia affects autobiographical memory, particularly impacting the ability to recall events that have happened in one's personal past. Patients with dissociative amnesia may have difficulty with their episodic memory, which is the type of declarative memory that contains information about events we have personally experienced, also known as autobiographical memory.
In contrast, procedural memory, which involves knowing how to do things like riding a bike or solving a puzzle, often remains intact. For someone who has experienced a traumatic event and subsequently suffers from dissociative amnesia, it can be hard to remember personal information or specific details from their own life story, including events that occurred before or after the trauma (retrograde or anterograde amnesia).