Kapur N, Millar J, Colbourn C, Abbott P, Kennedy P, Docherty T
Wessex Neurological Centre, Southampton General Hospital, England.
Brain Cogn. 1997 Oct;35(1):58-70. doi: 10.1006/brcg.1997.0927.
The temporal fractionation of long-term retention remains a relatively uncharted area in human memory research, and in particular there is little in the way of neuropsychological data that address this issue. We describe a patient with temporal lobe epilepsy who complained of amnesia for important events that had occurred in the previous 3-24 months, but who reported that her short-term and medium-term memory were normal. She displayed normal performance on traditional tests of short-term and long-term retention, performing at a very similar level to that of age- and sex-matched healthy control subjects on immediate and half-hour delayed recall measures. Forty days later, however, she showed a dense amnesia for recall of such information, whereas control subjects could readily recall much of the original stimuli. She also showed evidence of memory loss for news events that had occurred over the previous few years. MRI scanning and EEG brain mapping indicated left temporal lobe pathology, with a possible epileptogenic focus in the left anterior hippocampus. These data provide empirical evidence for the existence of a distinct very long-term consolidation process in human episodic memory and point to its neural correlates in the temporal lobe. Transfer of information into a permanent long-term memory store may entail multiple-stage consolidation processes rather than a single-stage, unitary consolidation process.
长期记忆的时间分段在人类记忆研究中仍是一个相对未知的领域，尤其是几乎没有神经心理学数据涉及这一问题。我们描述了一位颞叶癫痫患者，她诉说对过去3至24个月内发生的重要事件失忆，但报告其短期和中期记忆正常。她在传统的短期和长期记忆测试中表现正常，在即时回忆和半小时延迟回忆测试中的表现与年龄和性别匹配的健康对照受试者非常相似。然而，40天后，她对这类信息的回忆出现严重失忆，而对照受试者能够轻易回忆起许多原始刺激内容。她还表现出对过去几年发生的新闻事件失忆的迹象。MRI扫描和脑电图脑图谱显示左颞叶病变，左前海马体可能存在致痫灶。这些数据为人类情景记忆中存在独特的极长期巩固过程提供了实证依据，并指出了其在颞叶中的神经关联。信息转移到永久性长期记忆存储可能需要多阶段巩固过程，而不是单阶段的统一巩固过程。
