The Michael S. Goodman '74
Memorial Lectures
Department of Psychology, Brown University
Dr. Stefan Köhler
University of Western Ontario
“Medial temporal-lobe mechanisms
that support episodic memory”
Monday, March 31, 2008
Metcalf Research Laboratory
190 Thayer Street
Room 129
4:00 p.m.
Reception to follow - MRL 124-125
Abstract
Episodic memory allows humans to remember personally experienced events and to recognize the prior occurrence of those aspects of their environment that they have encountered before. It builds on the ability to encode, store, and consciously recover information about the elements of specific episodes and their relationships. Medial temporal-lobe structures have long been implicated in episodic memory through studies of amnesia. Yet, the specification of their exact functional role remains a topic of intense scientific debate. In the present talk, I will review recent evidence from a number of neuroimaging experiments in healthy individuals and from studies in patients with brain lesions that have shed new light on the functional organization of the medial temporal lobes. With this review, I aim to show that significant advances in understanding emerge when a framework is adapted that assigns distinct functional roles to different medial temporal-lobe structures within the context of knowledge about their pattern of neuroanatomical connectivity. At the cognitive level, this work highlights the importance of distinguishing between item-based and relational processing, and between familiarity and conscious recollection, when determining the neural mechanisms that support episodic memory.