Authors:

LEE, A.C.H., Buckley, M.J., Pegman, S.J., Spiers, H., SCAHILL, V.L., Gaffan, D., Bussey, T.J., Davies, R.R., Kapur, N., Hodges, J.R. & Graham, K.S.

Reference:

Year of publication:

2005

CBU number:

6092

Abstract:

There has been considerable debate as to whether the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex may subserve both memory and perception. We administered a series of non-mnemonic oddity tasks, in which subjects selected the odd stimulus from a visual array, to amnesic patients with either selective hippocampal damage (HC group) or more extensive medial temporal damage, including the perirhinal cortex (MTL group). All patients performed normally when the stimuli could be discriminated using simple visual features, even if faces or complex virtual reality scenes were presented. Both patient groups were, however, severly impaired at scene discrimination when a significant demand was placed on processing conjunctions of spatial information, while only the MTL group showed a significant deficit in oddity judgements of faces and objects when perception of conjunctions of object features was emphasized. These observations provide compelling evidence that the human hippocampus and perirhinal cortex may subserve spatial and object perception respectively.