Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2016:67:51-82.
doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033739. Epub 2015 Sep 10.

Remembering Preservation in Hippocampal Amnesia

Ian A Clark  1 , Eleanor A Maguire  1
Affiliations
Review

Remembering Preservation in Hippocampal Amnesia

Ian A Clark et al. Annu Rev Psychol. 2016.

Abstract

The lesion-deficit model dominates neuropsychology. This is unsurprising given powerful demonstrations that focal brain lesions can affect specific aspects of cognition. Nowhere is this more evident than in patients with bilateral hippocampal damage. In the past 60 years, the amnesia and other impairments exhibited by these patients have helped to delineate the functions of the hippocampus and shape the field of memory. We do not question the value of this approach. However, less prominent are the cognitive processes that remain intact following hippocampal lesions. Here, we collate the piecemeal reports of preservation of function following focal bilateral hippocampal damage, highlighting a wealth of information often veiled by the field's focus on deficits. We consider how a systematic understanding of what is preserved as well as what is lost could add an important layer of precision to models of memory and the hippocampus.

Keywords: deficits; hippocampus; memory; navigation; neuropsychology; scene construction.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The anatomy of the human hippocampus. Upper panels show the structural MRI scan of a healthy individual in sagittal view (within the white box), coronal and axial views – where the (left) hippocampus is indicated with a white asterisk and the right hippocampus is free to view. Lower panels show 3-D rendering of two hippocampi with the subfields colour-coded.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Examples of bilateral hippocampal damage in three patients. Within the upper left green box is a coronal section from a healthy brain with the two hippocampi indicated by white arrows. The three other panels show coronal sections from patients with damage to the two hippocampi.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Scene processing and the hippocampus. Upper panels are examples of scenes used in the scene viewing condition of Zeidman et al’s (2014) fMRI study. Lower panels show a schematic of the two hippocampi from that study indicating activity associated with viewing scenes (perception), constructing scenes in the mind’s eye and an area in anterior medial hippocampus of maximal overlap in the activity associated with the two conditions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Aberson C. Interpreting null results: Improving presentation and conclusions with confidence intervals. Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. 2002;1:36–42.
    1. Addis DR, Wong AT, Schacter DL. Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration. Neuropsychologia. 2007;45:1363–77. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Aggleton JP, Shaw C. Amnesia and recognition memory: A re-analysis of psychometric data. Neuropsychologia. 1996;34:51–62. - PubMed
    1. Albasser MM, Poirier GL, Warburton EC, Aggleton JP. Hippocampal lesions halve immediate–early gene protein counts in retrosplenial cortex: distal dysfunctions in a spatial memory system. Eur J Neurosci. 2007;26:1254–66. - PubMed
    1. Aly M, Ranganath C, Yonelinas Andrew P. Detecting changes in scenes: The hippocampus is critical for strength-based perception. Neuron. 2013;78:1127–37. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types