Perceptual and mnemonic matching-to-sample in humans: contributions of the hippocampus, perirhinal and other medial temporal lobe cortices

Two questions were addressed by the present study. The first was whether the previously reported item recognition deficit which is shown by amnesic patients may be due to a perceptual rather than a memory deficit. To address this question a group of amnesic patients were tested on a 14-choice forced-choice visual item recognition test which included a simultaneous condition in which the sample remained visible during the matching decision and a zero second delay. Eacott, Gaffan and Murray (1994) have reported an impairment in simultaneous matching-to-sample following perirhinal damage in monkeys. In our amnesic patients, a deficit was found only after filled delays of 10 seconds or longer and this was also the case for a subgroup of patients whose damage included the perirhinal cortex. The second question, which arose from the model of Aggleton and Brown (1999), was whether performance on the DMS task would remain intact following selective damage to the hippocampus. We tested a patient with bilateral damage to the hippocampus on the 14-choice DMS task and found that her performance was not significantly impaired at delays of up to 30 seconds.