Fritz Jonathan, Mishkin Mortimer, Saunders Richard C
Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Jun 28;102(26):9359-64. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0503998102. Epub 2005 Jun 20.
Monkeys trained preoperatively on a task designed to assess auditory recognition memory were impaired after removal of either the rostral superior temporal gyrus or the medial temporal lobe but were unaffected by lesions of the rhinal cortex. Behavioral analysis indicated that this result occurred because the monkeys did not or could not use long-term auditory recognition, and so depended instead on short-term working memory, which is unaffected by rhinal lesions. The findings suggest that monkeys may be unable to place representations of auditory stimuli into a long-term store and thus question whether the monkey's cerebral memory mechanisms in audition are intrinsically different from those in other sensory modalities. Furthermore, it raises the possibility that language is unique to humans not only because it depends on speech but also because it requires long-term auditory memory.
术前接受旨在评估听觉识别记忆任务训练的猴子，在切除喙侧颞上回或内侧颞叶后出现功能受损，但鼻周皮质损伤并未对其产生影响。行为分析表明，出现这一结果是因为猴子没有或无法运用长期听觉识别，而是依赖短期工作记忆，而短期工作记忆不受鼻周皮质损伤的影响。这些发现表明，猴子可能无法将听觉刺激的表征存入长期存储，因此对猴子听觉中的大脑记忆机制是否与其他感觉模态的机制存在本质差异提出了质疑。此外，这也增加了一种可能性，即语言之所以为人类所独有，不仅是因为它依赖于言语，还因为它需要长期听觉记忆。
