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Brain Advance Access published online on August 29, 2008
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awn191
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Reorganization of associative memory in humans with long-standing hippocampal damage

Mischa Braun1, Carsten Finke1, Florian Ostendorf1, Thomas-Nicolas Lehmann2, Karl-Titus Hoffmann3 and Christoph J. Ploner1

1Department of Neurology, 2Department of Neurosurgery and 3Department of Neuroradiology, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, D-10117 Berlin, Germany

Correspondence to: Christoph J. Ploner, MD, Department of Neurology, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Virchow-Klinikum, Augustenburger Platz 1, D-13353 Berlin, Germany E-mail: christoph.ploner{at}charite.de

Conflicting theories have been advanced to explain why hippocampal lesions affect distinct memory domains and spare others. Recent findings in monkeys suggest that lesion-induced plasticity may contribute to the seeming preservation of some of these domains. We tested this hypothesis by investigating visuo-spatial associative memory in two patient groups with similar surgical lesions to the right medial temporal lobe, but different preoperative disease courses (benign brain tumours, mean: 1.8 ± 0.6 years, n = 5, age: 28.2 ± 4.0 years; hippocampal sclerosis, mean: 16.8 ± 1.9 years, n = 9, age: 38.9 ± 4.1 years). Compared to controls (n = 14), tumour patients showed a significant delay-dependent deficit in memory of colour–location associations. No such deficit was observed in hippocampal sclerosis patients, which appeared to benefit from a compensatory mechanism that was inefficient in tumour patients. These results indicate that long-standing hippocampal damage can yield significant functional reorganization of the neural substrate underlying memory in the human brain. We suppose that this process accounts for some of the discrepancies between results from previous lesion studies of the human medial temporal lobe.

Key Words: associative memory; short-term memory; medial temporal lobe; hippocampus; plasticity

Abbreviations: ERC, entorhinal cortex; HIP, hippocampus; ITC, inferotemporal cortex; MTL, medial temporal lobe; PHC, parahippocampal cortex; PRC, perirhinal cortex

Received March 31, 2008. Revised July 15, 2008. Accepted July 29, 2008.


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