Neuropsychology of human memory

Abstract

The basic feature of medial temporal lobe amnesia is a severe anterograde amnesia, eventually followed by retrograde amnesia. It is not restricted to any specific sensory modality nor to verbal or non-verbal aspects. Other cognitive capacities (speech, etc.), short-term memory, and the ability to learn and remember tasks which do not require recollection of specific experiences are preserved. One of the critical structures involved is the hippocampus. Korsakoff 's syndrome is caracterized by damage of the thalamic medial dorsal nucleus and the mammilary bodies. The destruction of fiber connections running through the mammillothalamic tract and the internal medullary lamina of thalamus may be even more important than nuclear mass loss . Both in Korsakoff as in medial temporal lobe amnesia, there is an impairment of declarative (or explicit) memory but not of procedural (or implicit) memory. Brain structures involved in implicit memory are not yet well identified. The striatum may be a substrate for procedural memory; priming possibly occurs at the posterior cerebral cortex; animal studies have shown the role of cerebellum in the classical conditioning of motor responses.