Parker A, Gaffan D
Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 1997 Aug;35(8):1093-102. doi: 10.1016/s0028-3932(97)00042-0.
Six Macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were trained in an object-in-place memory task, designed to capture the 'whole scene' nature of episodic memory. In this task the correct, rewarded, response in each scene was to a particular object of a pair, which always occupied a particular position in a unique background which had been generated using randomly chosen colours and shapes. In each session, the monkey learned a new list of these unique scenes. The animals then underwent surgical ablation of either the anterior thalamic nuclei or the cingulate cortex. It was found that the animals with anterior thalamic lesions showed a substantial impairment, whereas the monkeys with cingulate cortex ablations were not significantly impaired at the task. These results confirm the importance of the anterior thalamic nuclei in episodic memory, and suggest that the cingulate gyrus is not a region which is crucial in the type of episodic memory task used in the present experiment.
六只猕猴（恒河猴）接受了一项物体位置记忆任务的训练，该任务旨在捕捉情景记忆的“整体场景”性质。在这个任务中，每个场景中正确的、有奖励的反应是针对一对特定物体中的一个，该物体总是位于一个独特背景中的特定位置，这个背景是使用随机选择的颜色和形状生成的。在每个实验环节中，猴子学习一组新的这些独特场景。然后，这些动物接受了前丘脑核或扣带回皮质的手术切除。结果发现，前丘脑损伤的动物表现出明显的损伤，而扣带回皮质切除的猴子在该任务中没有受到显著损伤。这些结果证实了前丘脑核在情景记忆中的重要性，并表明扣带回在本实验所使用的情景记忆任务类型中不是一个关键区域。
