Memory, Visual Discrimination Performance, and the Human Hippocampus

We evaluated recent proposals that the hippocampus supports certain kinds of visual discrimination performance, for example, when spatial processing is required and the stimuli have a high degree of feature overlap. Patients with circumscribed hippocampal lesions tried to discriminate between images of similar faces or images of similar scenes. In one condition, elements of the stimulus display repeated from trial to trial, and in another condition every trial was unique. In the repeated condition for both faces and scenes, controls gradually improved their performance across testing. In the trial-unique condition, no improvement occurred. The patients were impaired for both faces and scenes in the repeated condition where controls could benefit from learning. However, the patients were fully intact in the trial-unique condition. The results suggest that previous reports of impaired discrimination performance after medial temporal lobe damage may reflect impaired learning rather than impaired visual perception. The findings support the fundamental idea that memory is a distinct cerebral function separable from other perceptual and cognitive abilities.