An animal model of recognition memory and medial temporal lobe amnesia: History and current issues

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.004

Neuropsychologia

Volume 48, Issue 8, July 2010, Pages 2234-2244

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.004 Get rights and content

Abstract

The medial temporal lobe includes a system of anatomically connected structures that are essential for declarative memory (conscious memory for facts and events). A prominent form of declarative memory is recognition memory (the ability to identify a recently encountered item as familiar). Recognition memory has been frequently assessed in humans and in the experimental animal. This article traces the successful development of an animal model of human medial temporal lobe amnesia, which eventually identified the structures in the medial temporal lobe important for memory. Attention is given to two prominent behavioral paradigms (delayed nonmatching to sample and tests of spontaneous novelty preference).

Introduction

In 1899, at a medical meeting in St. Petersburg, Bekhterev (1900) presented the brain of a patient who had exhibited striking memory problems as the most significant clinical symptom. The primary brain pathology was noted to be bilateral softening of the hippocampus and medial temporal cortex. During the following decades a few clinical case studies also suggested a connection between memory impairment and medial temporal lobe damage (Glees and Griffith, 1952, Grünthal, 1947, Hegglin, 1953). Yet a clear connection between memory and medial temporal lobe function would not be achieved until findings were reported for the noted amnesic patient H.M. (Scoville & Milner, 1957).

Section snippets

H.M. and the modern era of memory research

The modern era of memory research began with the description of patient H.M. by William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner (Scoville and Milner, 1957, Squire, 2009). H.M. had an extensive history of minor and major seizures that were unresponsive to antiepileptic medication. He had minor seizures beginning at 10 years of age, and major seizures began to appear when he was 16. The major seizures occurred without warning as generalized convulsions that involved loss of consciousness followed by

Efforts to develop an animal model of medial temporal lobe amnesia

The findings from H.M. were initially met with some skepticism, especially because early efforts to replicate his memory deficit in animals were unsuccessful. These efforts in fact began almost immediately when Scoville himself came to Montreal and did the same surgery in monkeys that he had done with H.M. (e.g., Correll & Scoville, 1960, 1965). However, these monkeys and others with medial temporal lesions were able to learn tasks that seemed similar to tasks that H.M. could not learn. For

Multiple memory systems

A major difficultly during the 1960s and 1970s was that it was not appreciated that tasks could be supported by different brain systems. Many of the tasks given to animals with hippocampal lesions were in fact skill-based tasks that amnesic patients would have been able to acquire, or they were tasks that animals could learn as a skill even if humans tended to learn the task by consciously memorizing the material. Establishing an animal model would require developing tasks that assess the type

One-trial memory tests and the successful development of an animal model

A key advance in establishing a model of human medial temporal lobe amnesia was the implementation of one-trial memory tests for the monkey that assess what one would now call declarative memory. In 1974, David Gaffan suggested that many tests of memory in animals with hippocampal damage might not be similar to the tests that reveal memory impairment in amnesic patients. Accordingly, if one wants to relate the animal work to work in humans it is not adequate to use any convenient test in which

The emergence of spontaneous novelty preference tasks (and an easy way to test recognition memory)

Coincidentally, at about the same time that H.M. was first described in 1957, the seeds were being planted for an important new behavioral test for visual recognition memory in the experimental animal. This paradigm would eventually become the most frequently used test of recognition memory in the experimental animal and an important tool for studying MTL amnesia.

In 1956 Robert Frantz described a method to study early visual development in animals (Frantz, 1956). The method had its genesis in

Initial insights from the animal model of human medial temporal lobe amnesia

Early work with the DNMS task revealed severe, delay-dependent memory impairment following large medial temporal lobe lesions that damaged the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the cortex underlying these structures (the H⁺A⁺ lesion; Mishkin, 1978). (The “+” denotes that the cortex immediately adjacent to the target structure was damaged.) The H⁺A⁺ lesion impaired memory more severely than when damage was restricted to the posterior medial temporal lobe and involved the hippocampus, the posterior

Amygdala damage is eliminated as a critical structure in amnesia

As noted above, it was initially supposed that the severe memory impairment observed in monkeys on the DNMS task was due to combined damage to the hippocampus and amygdala (Mishkin, 1978). However, subsequent studies revealed that impairment could not be attributed to amygdala damage. Thus, selective damage to the amygdala did not impair performance on the DNMS task and also did not exacerbate the memory impairment associated with the H⁺ lesion (Zola-Morgan, Squire, & Amaral, 1989b). In

The anatomy and organization of the medial temporal lobe

The system of structures important for recognition memory includes the hippocampus (dentate gyrus, CA fields and subiculum) and the entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices (Fig. 1). Note that in the rat, the parahippocampal cortex is referred to as postrhinal cortex.

The hippocampus lies at the end of the processing hierarchy of the medial temporal lobe, receiving input from both the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices as well as the entorhinal cortex (Fig. 2). Guided by the

The perirhinal cortex

Once a clear understanding that the cortical regions of the MTL were important for memory, it became important to characterize how they contributed. For example, the perirhinal cortex and area TE are immediately adjacent to each other in the temporal lobe and are reciprocally interconnected. These areas are thought to lie at the interface between visual perception and visual memory, but it has been unclear what their separate contributions might be. Studies of monkeys suggest that perirhinal

Recognition memory and the hippocampus

The title of the classic paper by Scoville and Milner (1957) was “Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions.” The title implied somewhat misleadingly, that the memory loss in patient H.M. was due to the direct damage to the hippocampus. However, the last paragraph of the paper states the point quite correctly: “It is concluded that the anterior hippocampus and hippocampal gyrus, either separately or together, are critically concerned in the retention of current experience.”

Conclusion

This article provides a brief history of the work that led to the view that the medial temporal lobe is predominately involved in a particular form of memory (declarative memory). The article also outlined how an animal model of amnesia in the monkey and in the rodent has been particularly valuable for evaluating and understanding the anatomy of recognition memory. The perirhinal cortex and hippocampus both appear to contribute in important ways to recognition memory (Squire et al., 2007). But

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An animal model of recognition memory and medial temporal lobe amnesia: History and current issues

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

H.M. and the modern era of memory research

Efforts to develop an animal model of medial temporal lobe amnesia

Multiple memory systems

One-trial memory tests and the successful development of an animal model

The emergence of spontaneous novelty preference tasks (and an easy way to test recognition memory)

Initial insights from the animal model of human medial temporal lobe amnesia

Amygdala damage is eliminated as a critical structure in amnesia

The anatomy and organization of the medial temporal lobe

The perirhinal cortex

Recognition memory and the hippocampus

Conclusion

Trends in Cognitive Science

Behavioral Brain Research

Behavioral Brain Research

Neuron

Neuropsychologia

Trends in Cognitive Science

Behavioral Brain Research

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Neuroscience Letters

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Neuropsychologia

Behavioral Brain Research

Behavioral Brain Research

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Brain Research Bulletin

Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

Neuropsychologia

Behavioral Brain Research

Neuropsychologia

One-trial object recognition by rats

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Damage limited to the hippocampal region produces long-lasting memory impairment in monkeys

Journal of Neuroscience

Ontogenetic development of habit and memory formation in primates

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Limbic-dependent recognition memory in monkeys develops early in infancy

Learning and Memory

Effects of stress and hippocampal NMDA receptor antagonism on recognition memory in rats

Learning and Memory

Perirhinal cortex resolves feature ambiguity in configural object recognition and perceptual oddity tasks

Learning and Memory

Perceptual functions of perirhinal cortex in rats: zero-delay object recognition and simultaneous oddity discriminations

Journal of Neuroscience

Opposite relationship of hippocampal and rhinal cortex damage to delayed nonmatching-to-sample deficits in monkeys

Hippocampus

Hippocampal formation lesions produce memory impairment in the rhesus monkey

Hippocampus

Demonstration eines Gehirns mit Zerstö rung der vorderen und inneren Theile der Hirnrinde beider Schlä fenlappen

Neurologisches Zeitblatt

Spatial memory, recognition memory, and the hippocampus

Proceedings of National Academy of Science of United States of America

Object recognition memory and the rodent hippocampus

Learning and Memory

Recognition memory: what are the roles of the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus?

Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Selective perceptual impairments after perirhinal cortex ablation

Journal of Neuroscience

Dissociation between the effects of damage to perirhinal cortex and area TE

Learning and Memory

Perception and recognition memory in monkeys following lesions of area TE and perirhinal cortex

Learning and Memory

Functionally dissociating aspects of event memory: The effects of combined perirhinal and postrhinal cortex lesions on object and place memory in the rat

Journal of Neuroscience

Memory, perception, and the ventral visual-perirhinal-hippocampal stream: Thinking outside of the boxes

Hippocampus

Perirhinal cortex resolves feature ambiguity in complex visual discriminations

European Journal of Neuroscience

Impairments in visual discrimination after perirhinal cortex lesions: testing ‘declarative’ vs ‘perceptual-mnemonic’ views of perirhinal cortex function

European Journal of Neuroscience

Perirhinal cortex and feature-ambiguous discriminations

Learning and Memory

Effect of bilateral hippocampal ablation on DRL performance

Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology

Impaired recognition memory in rats after damage to the hippocampus