PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Olson, Ingrid R.
AU  - Page, Katie
AU  - Moore, Katherine Sledge
AU  - Chatterjee, Anjan
AU  - Verfaellie, Mieke
TI  - Working Memory for Conjunctions Relies on the Medial Temporal Lobe
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1923-05.2006
DP  - 2006 Apr 26
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 4596--4601
VI  - 26
IP  - 17
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/17/4596.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/17/4596.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2006 Apr 26; 26
AB  - A prominent theory of hippocampal function proposes that the hippocampus is importantly involved in relating or binding together separate pieces of information to form an episodic representation. This hypothesis has only been applied to studies of long-term memory because the paradigmatic view of the hippocampus is that it is not critical for short-term forms of memory. However, relational processing is important in many working memory tasks, especially tasks using visual stimuli. Here, we test the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobes are important for relational memory even over short delays. The task required patients with medial temporal lobe amnesia and controls to remember three objects, locations, or object-location conjunctions over 1 or 8 s delays. The results show that working memory for objects and locations was at normal levels, but that memory for conjunctions was severely impaired at 8 s delays. Additional analyses suggest that the hippocampus per se is critical for accurate conjunction working memory. We propose that the hippocampus is critically involved in memory for conjunctions at both short and long delays.