Human amnesia and animal models of amnesia: Performance of amnesic patients on tests designed for the monkey.

Abstract

The performance of amnesic patients was assessed on five tasks, which have figured prominently in the development of animal models of human amnesia in the monkey. The amnesic patients were impaired on four of these tasks (delayed nonmatching to sample, object-reward association, 8-pair concurrent discrimination learning, and an object discrimination task), in correspondence with previous findings for monkeys with bilateral medial temporal or diencephalic lesions. Moreover, performance of the amnesic patients correlated with the ability to verbalize the principle underlying the tasks and with the ability to describe and recognize the stimulus materials. These tasks therefore seem to be sensitive to the memory functions that are affected in human amnesia, and they can provide valid measures of memory impairment in studies with monkeys. For the fifth task (24-hour concurrent discrimination learning), the findings for the amnesic patients did not correspond to previous findings for operated monkeys. Whereas monkeys with medial temporal lesions reportedly learn this task at a normal rate, the amnesic patients were markedly impaired. Monkeys may learn this task differently than humans.

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   Zola-Morgan, S, Squire, LR, Amaral, DG · 1986 · The Journal of Neuroscience

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Cited by (28)

1. Memory and the hippocampus: A synthesis from findings with rats, monkeys, and humans.
   Squire, Larry R. · 1992 · Psychological Review
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   Squire, Larry R., Zola-Morgan, Stuart · 1991 · Science
3. The medial temporal lobe
   Squire, Larry R., Stark, Craig E.L., Clark, Robert E. · 2004 · Annual Review of Neuroscience
4. The Medial Temporal Lobe and Recognition Memory
   Eichenbaum, H., Yonelinas, A.P., Ranganath, C. · 2007 · Annual Review of Neuroscience
5. Memory systems of the brain: A brief history and current perspective
   Squire, Larry R. · 2004 · Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

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