Unpacking the Medial Temporal Lobe: Separating Recollection and Familiarity

Abstract

Our understanding of how the medial temporal lobe (MTL) contributes to human cognition has advanced enormously over the past half a century. My work in the 1990s characterizing the role of recollection and familiarity processes in episodic memory led me to study the MTL's role in these two memory processes. In the current paper, I provide a personal commentary in which I describe the motivating ideas, as well as the invaluable impact of mentors, colleagues, and students that led to a series of studies showing that conscious recollection is critically dependent on the hippocampus, whereas familiarity-based judgments are dependent on regions such as the perirhinal cortex.