Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA.
Vision Res. 2019 Dec;165:123-130. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2019.10.007. Epub 2019 Nov 14.
The hippocampus is the canonical memory system in the brain and is not typically considered part of the visual system. Yet, it sits atop the ventral visual stream and has been implicated in certain aspects of vision. Here I review the place of the hippocampal memory system in vision science. After a brief primer on the local circuity, external connectivity, and computational functions of the hippocampus, I explore what can be learned from each field about the other. I first present four areas of vision science (scene perception, imagery, eye movements, attention) that challenge our current understanding of the hippocampus in terms of its role in episodic memory. In the reverse direction, I leverage this understanding to inform vision science in other ways, presenting a working hypothesis about a unique form of visual representation. This spatiotemporal similarity hypothesis states that the hippocampus represents objects according to whether they co-occur in space and/or time, and not whether they look alike, as elsewhere in the visual system. This tuning may reflect hippocampal mechanisms of pattern separation, relational binding, and statistical learning, allowing the hippocampus to generate visual expectations to facilitate search and recognition.
海马体是大脑中的典型记忆系统，通常不被认为是视觉系统的一部分。然而，它位于腹侧视觉流的顶部，并被牵连到某些视觉方面。在这里，我回顾了海马体记忆系统在视觉科学中的地位。在简要介绍了海马体的局部回路、外部连接和计算功能之后，我探讨了从每个领域可以了解到的其他领域的知识。我首先介绍了视觉科学的四个领域（场景感知、意象、眼球运动、注意力），这些领域挑战了我们目前对海马体在情景记忆中的作用的理解。在相反的方向上，我利用这种理解以其他方式为视觉科学提供信息，提出了一个关于独特视觉表示形式的工作假设。这个时空相似性假说指出，海马体根据物体是否在空间和/或时间上共同出现来表示物体，而不是像在视觉系统的其他地方那样根据它们的外观相似性来表示物体。这种调谐可能反映了海马体的模式分离、关系绑定和统计学习机制，使海马体能够产生视觉期望，以促进搜索和识别。
