Preview
This chapter reviews evidence from animal models of amnesia. The efforts to model amnesia associated with damage to the medial temporal lobe followed two parallel approaches, one using monkeys as the experimental subjects and the other using primarily rats. The studies on monkeys began appropriately by reproducing the same pervasive medial temporal damage that occurred in H. M. The early studies on rats focused on the hippocampus, leaving out of the experimental ablation other structures that were damaged in H. M. and in experiments on monkeys. The combined results of experiments testing provide compelling evidence for a comprehensive account of the cognitive mechanisms of declarative memory. Various kinds of learning, spatial and nonspatial, simple and complex, can be accomplished independent of the hippocampus in animals, as indeed is the case in human amnesic patients as well. However, the hippocampus is required to link together the representations of overlapping experiences into a relational representation and supports the flexible and inferential expression of indirect associations among items within that larger organization of linked memories.
Keywords: animal models; amnesia; medial temporal lobe; monkeys; rats; hippocampus; declarative memory
Chapter. 14814 words. Illustrated.
Subjects: Neuroscience
Go to Oxford Scholarship Online » abstract
Full text: subscription required
How to subscribe Recommend to my Librarian
Buy this work at Oxford University Press »
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Please, subscribe or login to access all content.