Neuron
Volume 75, Issue 1, 12 July 2012, Pages 157-167
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Article
Intact Memory for Irrelevant Information Impairs Perception in Amnesia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.05.014Get rights and content
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Summary

Memory and perception have long been considered separate cognitive processes, and amnesia resulting from medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage is thought to reflect damage to a dedicated memory system. Recent work has questioned these views, suggesting that amnesia can result from impoverished perceptual representations in the MTL, causing an increased susceptibility to interference. Using a perceptual matching task for which fMRI implicated a specific MTL structure, the perirhinal cortex, we show that amnesics with MTL damage including the perirhinal cortex, but not those with damage limited to the hippocampus, were vulnerable to object-based perceptual interference. Importantly, when we controlled such interference, their performance recovered to normal levels. These findings challenge prevailing conceptions of amnesia, suggesting that effects of damage to specific MTL regions are better understood not in terms of damage to a dedicated declarative memory system, but in terms of impoverished representations of the stimuli those regions maintain.

Highlights

► Perception can be impaired in amnesia resulting from perirhinal cortex (PRC) damage ► Reducing object perceptual interference can rescue PRC-damaged amnesics' performance ► Memory loss after PRC damage can reflect heightened susceptibility to interference ► Impoverished object representations may contribute to amnesia

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These authors contributed equally to this work