期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2015
卷号：112
期号：15
页码：4767-4772
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1503863112
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificanceIt has been suggested that the primary role of the hippocampus is to construct spatial scenes and further that memory impairments following hippocampal damage may be attributed to spatial processing demands in memory tasks. Two types of tasks have contributed evidence to this perspective: boundary extension and scene imagination. Boundary extension refers to the phenomenon whereby a scene is remembered as having an expanded background. Imagination tasks ask participants to mentally construct scenes. We tested patients with hippocampal damage on both types of tasks. They were intact at both boundary extension and imagination, although they remembered the tasks poorly. These results support the traditional view that the human hippocampus is primarily important for memory. We evaluated two different perspectives about the function of the human hippocampus-one that emphasizes the importance of memory and another that emphasizes the importance of spatial processing and scene construction. We gave tests of boundary extension, scene construction, and memory to patients with lesions limited to the hippocampus or large lesions of the medial temporal lobe. The patients were intact on all of the spatial tasks and impaired on all of the memory tasks. We discuss earlier studies that associated performance on these spatial tasks to hippocampal function. Our results demonstrate the importance of medial temporal lobe structures for memory and raise doubts about the idea that these structures have a prominent role in spatial cognition.
