Testing for material-specific effects in long-term memory: evidence from amnesia and functional neuroimaging.

许多疾病，如癫痫，痴呆，中风和病毒感染，导致记忆困难，特别是我们记忆过去事件的能力（长期记忆，LTM）。两个区域，海马和嗅周皮质，被认为对LTM做出重要贡献，因为这两个区域中的任何一个的损伤都会导致记忆问题。然而，目前还不清楚这两个大脑区域是否共同支持LTM，或者它们是否扮演不同的角色，特别是对于视觉记忆。拟议中的研究通过测试海马体是否是场景记忆所必需的，而不是面部或物体记忆，以及如果嗅周皮层参与面部和物体记忆，而不是场景记忆，来解决这个问题。两种不同的技术被用来解决这个问题。首先，我们要求海马体和/或嗅周皮质受损的患者执行记忆任务，要求他们记住他们以前是否见过我们的三个视觉类别中的项目。我们希望知道这两种大脑结构的损伤是否会导致不同的记忆障碍模式。其次，我们让健康的参与者和患者在MRI扫描仪上进行记忆任务;这使我们能够确定大脑的哪些部分在记忆处理过程中被招募，并观察海马体和嗅周皮层是否对不同的视觉类别表现出不同的活动模式。这两部分拨款的研究结果将用于完善目前关于海马体和嗅周皮层如何支持LTM的想法，并开发新的模型和预测，这进一步加深了我们对这些大脑区域的损伤如何导致不同疾病的记忆困难的了解。该赠款的最后一部分旨在利用我们从患者和成像研究中收集的信息来改善患有以下疾病的个人的记忆力：海马损伤我们建议表明，如果患者专注于物体的个体细节，这将有助于提高他们对涉及这些物体的单词的记忆。如果我们能够证明从视觉刺激到语言刺激的转移，这将有助于临床医生和患者制定更好的策略来改善日常情况下的记忆。

A number of diseases, such as epilepsy, dementia, stroke and viral infections, result in memory difficulties, in particular our ability to remember events from the past (long-term memory, LTM). Two regions, the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex, are thought to make an important contribution to LTM as damage to either of these areas results in memory problems. It is unclear, however, whether these two brain regions work together to support LTM, or whether they play distinct roles, particularly for visual memory. The proposed research addresses this question by testing whether the hippocampus is necessary for scene, but not face or object, memory, and if the perirhinal cortex is involved in face and object, but not scene, memory. Two different techniques are used to address this question. First, we ask patients with damage to the hippocampus and/or perirhinal cortex to perform memory tasks in which they are required to remember whether they have previously seen items from our three visual categories. We wish to know whether damage to these two brain structures results in distinct patterns of memory impairment. Second, we ask healthy participants and patients to undertake memory tasks in an MRI scanner; this allows us to pinpoint which parts of the brain are recruited during memory processing, and to see if the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex show distinct patterns of activity for different visual categories. The findings from these two parts of the grant will be used to refine current ideas about how the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex support LTM, and to develop new models and predictions, that further our knowledge of how damage to these brain areas results in memory difficulties across different diseases.The final part to the grant aims to use the information we gather from our patient and imaging studies to improve memory in individuals with hippocampal damage. We propose to show that if patients concentrate on the individual details of objects this will help boost their memory for words referring to these objects. If we can demonstrate evidence of transfer from visual to verbal stimuli, this will help clinicians and patients develop better strategies for improving memory in everyday situations.