Bird Chris M, Vargha-Khadem Faraneh, Burgess Neil
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2008 Mar 7;46(4):1050-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.11.007. Epub 2007 Nov 19.
Item recognition for unfamiliar faces and scenes was tested in Jon, who has developmental amnesia resulting from bilateral hippocampal pathology. Performance and confidence judgements in healthy adults showed that both tests were equated for difficulty and had similar receiver operating characteristics (ROCs). Jon's performance on the faces test was indistinguishable from the controls, in both sensitivity and the shape of the ROC curve. In contrast his performance on the scenes test was markedly poor, and his ROC was inconsistent with both a standard dual process (DP; recollection and familiarity) model and an unequal variance signal detection model of recognition memory. Jon's data were as well fitted as controls' data by a DP model that included two recollection parameters, but required counter-intuitive parameter values corresponding to normal recollection and impaired familiarity, which likely reflect an idiosyncratic use of confidence judgements when his memory for the material is weak. The results highlight a limitation in using ROCs to estimate recollection and familiarity in patients who may have developed compensatory strategies for material that they have difficulty remembering (scenes, but not faces in this case). Overall, these data are difficult to reconcile with domain-general accounts of the hippocampal role in memory, including dual process models and the declarative model. Instead, the data indicate that the hippocampus plays a preferential role in the processing of topographical memoranda over faces memoranda.
对患有双侧海马病变导致的发展性失忆症的乔恩进行了对不熟悉面孔和场景的项目识别测试。健康成年人的表现和信心判断表明，两项测试在难度上是等同的，并且具有相似的接受者操作特征（ROC）。乔恩在面孔测试中的表现，无论是在敏感性还是ROC曲线的形状上，都与对照组没有区别。相比之下，他在场景测试中的表现明显较差，并且他的ROC与标准的双过程（DP；回忆和熟悉度）模型以及识别记忆的不等方差信号检测模型均不一致。乔恩的数据与包含两个回忆参数的DP模型对对照组数据的拟合程度一样好，但需要对应于正常回忆和受损熟悉度的反直觉参数值，这可能反映出当他对材料的记忆较弱时对信心判断的特殊运用。结果突出了在使用ROC来估计那些可能已经为难以记住的材料（在这种情况下是场景而非面孔）发展出补偿策略的患者的回忆和熟悉度时的局限性。总体而言，这些数据难以与海马体在记忆中的领域通用解释相协调，包括双过程模型和陈述性模型。相反，数据表明海马体在处理地形记忆方面比面孔记忆发挥着更优先的作用。
