Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego, CA 92161;Departments of Psychiatry.
The Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Eastern and Southern Norway, 0405 Oslo, Norway;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jul 8;111(27):9935-40. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1409878111. Epub 2014 Jun 23.
Hippocampal damage has been thought to result in broad memory impairment. Recent studies in humans, however, have raised the possibility that recognition memory for faces might be spared. In five experiments we investigated face recognition in patients with hippocampal lesions (H) or large medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions, including patients where neurohistological information was available. Recognition of novel faces was unequivocally intact in H patients but only at a short retention interval. Recognition memory for words, buildings, inverted faces, and famous faces was impaired. For MTL patients, recognition memory was impaired for all materials and across all retention intervals. These results indicate that structures other than the hippocampus, perhaps the perirhinal cortex, can support face recognition memory in H patients under some conditions. The fact that the faces were novel when recognition memory was intact does not fully account for our findings. We propose that the role of the hippocampus in recognition memory is related to how recognition decisions are accomplished. In typical recognition tasks, participants proceed by forming an association between a study item and the study list, and the recognition decision is later made based on whether participants believe the item was on the study list. We suggest that face recognition is an exception to this principle and that, at short retention intervals, participants can make their recognition decisions without making explicit reference to the study list. Important features of faces that might make face recognition exceptional are that they are processed holistically and are difficult to verbally label.
海马体损伤被认为会导致广泛的记忆损伤。然而，最近对人类的研究提出了一种可能性，即面部识别记忆可能不受影响。在五项实验中，我们研究了海马体损伤（H）或大内侧颞叶（MTL）损伤患者的面部识别能力，包括有神经组织学信息的患者。H 患者的新面孔识别能力毋庸置疑，但只能在短的保持间隔内识别。对单词、建筑物、倒置的面孔和著名面孔的识别记忆受损。对于 MTL 患者，所有材料和所有保留间隔的识别记忆都受损。这些结果表明，除了海马体之外的结构，也许是边缘皮层，在某些条件下可以支持 H 患者的面孔识别记忆。当识别记忆完好无损时，面孔是新的这一事实并不能完全解释我们的发现。我们提出，海马体在识别记忆中的作用与识别决策的完成方式有关。在典型的识别任务中，参与者通过在学习项目和学习列表之间形成关联来进行识别决策，然后根据参与者是否相信该项目在学习列表上来做出识别决策。我们认为，面部识别是该原则的例外，并且在短的保持间隔内，参与者可以在不明确参考学习列表的情况下做出识别决策。可能使面孔识别成为例外的面孔的重要特征是它们是整体处理的，并且难以用言语标记。
