Studies Of Amnesic Patients Research Articles

In memory of consolidation

How an animal learns, remembers, and uses information to guide adaptive behavior remains one of the most challenging questions in science today. Much progress was made in the twentieth century, and new tools available to neurobiological investigators have accelerated progress in the new century. Nevertheless, the road has been rocky and progress sometimes impeded by periodic polemic debates at a conceptual level. Retrospective examination of the nature of the divisive issues and how they were (or were not) resolved could help steer a new generation of investigators away from similar pitfalls and impasses. The same applies to scientists from other disciplines, recently joining in the “search for the engram,” who might not be aware of the vast literature generated, mainly by psychologists, in the middle decades of the last century. Our purpose here is not to furnish a complete review of this literature, but to provide a historical perspective for some of the unresolved issues that continue to be discussed within the context of the field of neurobiology of memory. For more general reviews, refer to McGaugh (2000) and Dudai (2004). Scientific investigation of memory processes was initiated at the end of the 19th century by psychologists in Germany, Ebbinghaus (1885) and then Mueller and Pilzecker (1900). Their studies of verbal learning and retention in human subjects led them to conclude that a memory trace was formed gradually over time after acquisition and they coined the term consolidation. Contemporary with this were the very influential clinical observations and theoretical elaborations of the French psychiatrist, Ribot (1882). From his studies of amnesic patients, he formulated “La loi de regression,” which simply notes that, as memories age, they become more resistant to trauma-induced amnesia.

Procedural memory in Korsakoff's disease under different movement feedback conditions

Within the field of cognitive neuroscience, it has become widely accepted to distinguish between declarative and nondeclarative memory, with different neurobiological substrates subserving these memory structures. This distinction has been inferred from the study of amnesic patients, including those suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome. It is commonly agreed that Korsakoff patients demonstrate intact memory for motor and perceptual skills (nondeclarative) whereas memory of various forms of factual knowledge (declarative) is severely impaired. In the present study, Korsakoff patients and a group of age-matched controls learned a new bimanual motor skill whereby performance was assessed in the presence and absence of augmented visual information feedback. Findings demonstrated that Korsakoff patients were able to learn and retain this skill when directive augmented information feedback was provided while no learning occurred at all in the absence of this information. These observations shed new light on the conditions required for preserved memory in amnesic patients and challenge the classic view that nondeclarative memory is invariably preserved. Instead, the quality of memory across both motor and cognitive dimensions appears to depend on the availability of task-specific information to guide performance, presumably allowing amnesic patients to bypass affected brain areas. This prompts for a reevaluation of current notions about procedural memory capacity in Korsakoff patients.

Memory systems of the brain: a cognitive neuropsychological analysis.

Neuropsychological studies of amnesic patients, cognitive studies of normal individuals, and functional neuroimaging studies have shaped our understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of various forms of human memory. This article reviews the functional and neural characteristics of working memory, declarative memory, and nondeclarative memory. In so doing, it highlights the pattern of impaired and preserved memory abilities that characterize different neurologic populations. This knowledge provides a framework for analyzing patients' neuropsychological deficits in terms of underlying cognitive processes.

Striatal activation during acquisition of a cognitive skill.

The striatum is thought to play an essential role in the acquisition of a wide range of motor, perceptual, and cognitive skills, but neuroimaging has not yet demonstrated striatal activation during nonmotor skill learning. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed while participants learned probabilistic classification, a cognitive task known to rely on procedural memory early in learning and declarative memory later in learning. Multiple brain regions were active during probabilistic classification compared with a perceptual-motor control task, including bilateral frontal cortices, occipital cortex, and the right caudate nucleus in the striatum. The left hippocampus was less active bilaterally during probabilistic classification than during the control task, and the time course of this hippocampal deactivation paralleled the expected involvement of medial temporal structures based on behavioral studies of amnesic patients. Findings provide initial evidence for the role of frontostriatal systems in normal cognitive skill learning.

New Approaches to the Study of Amnesic Patients: What Can a Neurofunctional Philosophy and Neural Network Methods Offer?

In this paper I first consider a neurofunctional approach to the study of amnesic patients. This approach stresses the need for theorising about the processing operations of brain regions and circuits rather than for theorising about neuropsychological syndromes. A syndrome-such as amnesia-may not exist, in any meaningful sense, if there is marked heterogeneity within the patients grouped together in this way. Powerful neuroimaging techniques may now allow a more useful basis for grouping patients in terms of lesion location rather than aetiology. In turn this will allow an evaluation of the information processing functions subserved by the lesioned structures. The second strand to the present paper stresses the weakness in the specification of current theories. This has made it difficult to select experimental tasks that decisively measure the key components of those theories. The paper makes the case that explicit neural network models are a useful way to try to overcome this problem. In line with these ideas, the paper begins to build a model of how the brain may achieve useful kinds of stimulus representations. Considerations of human behaviour in category learning tasks have emphasised parallel and interacting roles for both exemplar- and element-based stimulus representations. It is suggested that the hippocampus itself may encode exemplar representations, and these may provide a basis for episodic memory as well as some types of category learning. It is further suggested that the ventral striatum may encode the elementbased representations. The model allows some new and detailed predictions for the performance of amnesic subjects related to lesion location.

Memory Disorders in Alzheimer's Disease and the Organization of Human Memory

The Squire and Zola-Morgan parallel organization model of the memory and the Tulving hierarchical model were developed mainly through the study of amnesic patients. The predictions of these two models are different, the first being more open to double dissociations and less restrictive than the second. Alzheimer's Disease is characterized by a differential impairment of the memory systems and by an interindividual variability which may take the form of dissociations between preserved and disturbed abilities in some patients. The objective of this study was to use the memory dysfunctions of patients with AD to test the validity of the two models.Analysis of the group data provided an average profile of memory disturbance consistent both with much of the data given in AD literature and with the two models. Using a multiple single-case strategy, we demonstrated several simple dissociations which are for the greater part compatible with the two models. Two of the dissociations underline the limits of the Tulving model, which otherwise accounts for a lot of results. The study supports the relevance of AD for the understanding of the cognitive architecture of the human memory.

Models of memory: information processing.

A complete understanding of human memory will necessarily involve consideration of the active processes involved at the time of learning and of the organization and nature of representation of information in long-term memory. In addition to process and structure, it is important for theory to indicate the ways in which stimulus-driven and conceptually driven processes interact with each other in the learning situation. Not surprisingly, no existent theory provides a detailed specification of all of these factors. However, there are a number of more specific theories which are successful in illuminating some of the component structures and processes. The working memory model proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and modified subsequently has shown how the earlier theoretical construct of the short-term store should be replaced with the notion of working memory. In essence, working memory is a system which is used both to process information and to permit the transient storage of information. It comprises a number of conceptually distinct, but functionally interdependent components. So far as long-term memory is concerned, there is evidence of a number of different kinds of representation. Of particular importance is the distinction between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge, a distinction which has received support from the study of amnesic patients. Kosslyn has argued for a distinction between literal representation and propositional representation, whereas Tulving has distinguished between episodic and semantic memories. While Tulving's distinction is perhaps the best known, there is increasing evidence that episodic and semantic memory differ primarily in content rather than in process, and so the distinction may be of less theoretical value than was originally believed.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Précis of O'Keefe & Nadel'sThe hippocampus as a cognitive map

AbstractTheories of spatial cognition are derived from many sources. Psychologists are concerned with determining the features of the mind which, in combination with external inputs, produce our spatialized experience. A review of philosophical and other approaches has convinced us that the brain must come equipped to impose a three-dimensional Euclidean framework on experience – our analysis suggests that object re-identification may require such a framework. We identify this absolute, nonegocentric, spatial framework with a specific neural system centered in the hippocampus.A consideration of the kinds of behaviours in which such a spatial mapping system would be important is followed by an analysis of the anatomy and physiology of this system, with special emphasis on the place-coded neurons recorded in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. A tentative physiological model for the hippocampal cognitive map is proposed. A review of lesion studies, in tasks as diverse as discrimination learning, avoidance, and extinction, shows that the cognitive map notion can adequately explain much of the data.The model is extended to humans by the assumption that spatial maps are built in one hemisphere, semantic maps in the other. The latter provide a semantic deep structure within which discourse comprehension and production can be achieved. Evidence from the study of amnesic patients, briefly reviewed, is consistent with this extension.