Department of Psychology and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL, USA.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, USA ; Department of Neurology, Division of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2014 Sep 30;8:742. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00742. eCollection 2014.
Successful behavior requires actively acquiring and representing information about the environment and people, and manipulating and using those acquired representations flexibly to optimally act in and on the world. The frontal lobes have figured prominently in most accounts of flexible or goal-directed behavior, as evidenced by often-reported behavioral inflexibility in individuals with frontal lobe dysfunction. Here, we propose that the hippocampus also plays a critical role by forming and reconstructing relational memory representations that underlie flexible cognition and social behavior. There is mounting evidence that damage to the hippocampus can produce inflexible and maladaptive behavior when such behavior places high demands on the generation, recombination, and flexible use of information. This is seen in abilities as diverse as memory, navigation, exploration, imagination, creativity, decision-making, character judgments, establishing and maintaining social bonds, empathy, social discourse, and language use. Thus, the hippocampus, together with its extensive interconnections with other neural systems, supports the flexible use of information in general. Further, we suggest that this understanding has important clinical implications. Hippocampal abnormalities can produce profound deficits in real-world situations, which typically place high demands on the flexible use of information, but are not always obvious on diagnostic tools tuned to frontal lobe function. This review documents the role of the hippocampus in supporting flexible representations and aims to expand our understanding of the dynamic networks that operate as we move through and create meaning of our world.
成功的行为需要积极地获取和表示关于环境和人的信息，并灵活地操纵和使用这些获取的表示，以最优地在世界中行动和影响世界。额叶在大多数关于灵活或目标导向行为的描述中都占据着重要地位，这一点从额叶功能障碍患者经常报告的行为灵活性缺失中就可以得到证明。在这里，我们提出海马体也通过形成和重建关系记忆表示来发挥关键作用，这些记忆表示是灵活认知和社会行为的基础。越来越多的证据表明，当这种行为对信息的产生、重组和灵活使用提出很高要求时，海马体的损伤会导致行为变得不灵活和适应不良。这种情况在记忆、导航、探索、想象、创造力、决策、性格判断、建立和维持社会关系、同理心、社会话语和语言使用等各种能力中都有体现。因此，海马体及其与其他神经系统的广泛联系，支持信息的灵活使用。此外，我们还认为，这一理解具有重要的临床意义。海马体异常会导致在现实情况下出现严重的缺陷，这些缺陷通常需要灵活地使用信息，但在针对额叶功能的诊断工具上并不总是明显。这篇综述记录了海马体在支持灵活表示方面的作用，旨在扩展我们对动态网络的理解，这些网络在我们在世界中移动并创造意义时发挥作用。
