Simons Jon S, Peers Polly V, Hwang David Y, Ally Brandon A, Fletcher Paul C, Budson Andrew E
Brain Mapping Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2008 Mar 7;46(4):1185-91. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.07.024. Epub 2007 Aug 6.
An intriguing puzzle in cognitive neuroscience over recent years has been the common observation of parietal lobe activation in functional neuroimaging studies during the performance of human memory tasks. These findings have surprised scientists and clinicians because they challenge decades of established thinking that the parietal lobe does not support memory function. However, direct empirical investigation of whether circumscribed parietal lobe lesions might indeed be associated with human memory impairment has been lacking. Here we confirm using functional magnetic resonance imaging that significant parietal lobe activation is observed in healthy volunteers during a task assessing recollection of the context in which events previously occurred. However, patients with parietal lobe lesions that overlap closely with the regions activated in the healthy volunteers nevertheless exhibit normal performance on the same recollection task. Thus, although the processes subserved by the human parietal lobe appear to be recruited to support memory function, they are not a necessary requirement for accurate remembering to occur.
近年来，认知神经科学中一个引人入胜的谜题是，在人类记忆任务执行过程中，功能神经影像学研究普遍观察到顶叶激活。这些发现令科学家和临床医生感到惊讶，因为它们挑战了数十年来公认的观点，即顶叶不支持记忆功能。然而，对于局限性顶叶病变是否确实与人类记忆障碍相关，一直缺乏直接的实证研究。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像证实，在一项评估对先前事件发生背景的回忆的任务中，健康志愿者的顶叶出现了显著激活。然而，顶叶病变与健康志愿者激活区域紧密重叠的患者，在相同的回忆任务中仍表现正常。因此，尽管人类顶叶所支持的过程似乎被调动起来以支持记忆功能，但它们并非准确记忆发生的必要条件。
