Brain Activity Evidence for Recognition without Recollection after Early Hippocampal Damage

Amnesic patients with early and seemingly isolated hippocampal injury show relatively normal recognition memory scores. The cognitive profile of these patients raises the possibility that this recognition performance is maintained mainly by stimulus familiarity in the absence of recollection of cont...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 98; no. 14; pp. 8101 - 8106
Main Authors Düzel, E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Heinze, H. J., Mishkin, M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 03.07.2001
National Acad Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences
Subjects
Adult
Amnesia
Amnesia - physiopathology
Biological Sciences
Brain damage
College students
Electrodes
Female
Hippocampus
Hippocampus - physiopathology
Humans
Male
Memory
Neurology
Neuropsychology
Recall
Recognition memory
Recognition, Psychology - physiology
Scalp
Semantics
Time windows
Words
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Summary:Amnesic patients with early and seemingly isolated hippocampal injury show relatively normal recognition memory scores. The cognitive profile of these patients raises the possibility that this recognition performance is maintained mainly by stimulus familiarity in the absence of recollection of contextual information. Here we report electrophysiological data on the status of recognition memory in one of the patients, Jon. Jon's recognition of studied words lacks the event-related potential (ERP) index of recollection, viz., an increase in the late positive component (500-700 ms), under conditions that elicit it reliably in normal subjects. On the other hand, a decrease of the ERP amplitude between 300 and 500 ms, also reliably found in normal subjects, is well preserved. This so-called N400 effect has been linked to stimulus familiarity in previous ERP studies of recognition memory. In Jon, this link is supported by the finding that his recognized and unrecognized studied words evoked topographically distinct ERP effects in the N400 time window. These data suggest that recollection is more dependent on the hippocampal formation than is familiarity, consistent with the view that the hippocampal formation plays a special role in episodic memory, for which recollection is so critical.
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To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: emrah.duezel@medizin.unimagdeburg.de.
Contributed by M. Mishkin
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.131205798