Article

This review provides a historical overview of decades of research on recognition
memory, the process that allows both humans and animals to tell familiar from
novel items. The emphasis is put on how monkey research improved our
understanding of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) role and how tasks designed for
monkeys influenced research in humans. The story starts in the early 1950s. Back
then, memory was not a fashionable scientific topic. It was viewed as a function
of the whole brain and not of specialized brain areas. All that changed in
1957-1958 when Brenda Milner, a neuropsychologist from Montreal, described
patient H.M. He forgot all events as he lived them despite a fully preserved
intelligence. He had received a MTL resection to relieve epilepsy. H.M.
(1926-2008) would become the most influential patient in brain science. Which
structures among those included in H.M.'s large lesion were important for
recognition memory could not be evaluated in humans. It was gradually understood
only after the successful development of a monkey model of human amnesia by
Mishkin in 1978. Selective lesions and two behavioral tasks, delayed
nonmatching-to-sample and visual paired comparison, were used to distinguish the
contribution of the hippocampus from that of adjacent cortical areas. Driven by
findings in non-human primates, human research on recognition memory is now
trying to solve the question of whether the different structures composing MTL
contributes to familiarity and recollection, the two possible forms taken by
recognition. We described in particular two French patients, FRG and JMG, whose
deficits support the currently dominant model attributing to the perirhinal
cortex a critical role in recognition memory. Research on recognition memory has
implications for the clinician as it may help understanding the cognitive
deficits observed in different diseases. An illustration of such approach,
linking basic and applied research, is provided for Alzheimer's disease.
CI - Copyright (c) 2013. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.

Langue : ANGLAIS