Cogn Neuropsychol. 2001 Sep;18(6):481-508. doi: 10.1080/02643290125929.
The Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA; Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998) is a region within posterior parahippocampal cortex that responds selectively to visual stimuli that convey information about the layout of local space. Here we describe two patients who suffered damage to the PPA after vascular incidents. Both subsequently exhibited memory problems for topographical materials and were unable to navigate unassisted in unfamiliar environments. Performance on a continuous n-back visual memory test was significantly lower for novel scene-like stimuli than for novel object-like stimuli. In contrast, performance was normal on a famous landmark recognition task and on two perceptual tasks that required on-line analysis of scene geometry. Both patients were able to produce accurate maps of premorbidly learned places but were unable to produce accurate maps of new places. These results converge with previous neuroimaging work to demonstrate that the PPA (1) is selectively involved in processing information about the geometry of surrounding space, and (2) may play a more critical role in the encoding of this information into memory than in the initial perceptual processing, recognition, or recall of this information.
扣带皮层旁回位置区域（PPA；Epstein 和 Kanwisher，1998）是后扣带皮层内的一个区域，对传达局部空间布局信息的视觉刺激有选择性反应。在这里，我们描述了两名因血管事件而导致 PPA 受损的患者。两人随后都表现出对地形材料的记忆问题，无法在不熟悉的环境中独立导航。在连续 n 次视觉记忆测试中，对新颖的场景样刺激的表现明显低于对新颖的物体样刺激。相比之下，在著名地标识别任务和两个需要在线分析场景几何的感知任务中，表现正常。两名患者都能够准确地绘制出以前学习过的地方的地图，但无法绘制出新地方的地图。这些结果与之前的神经影像学研究相结合，证明了 PPA（1）选择性地参与处理周围空间几何信息，（2）在将此信息编码到记忆中可能比在初始感知处理、识别或回忆此信息中发挥更关键的作用。
