Involvement of the human thalamus in relational and non‐relational memory

Soei, Eleonore; Koch, Benno; Schwarz, Michael; Daum, Irene

doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06536.x

Cited by 19 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…The repeated finding that the integrity of the mammillary body-mammillothalamic tract-anterior thalamic group is necessary for episodic memory ) might, at first, imply that damage to any one of these three structures is a necessary pre-condition for a consistent recognition memory loss, although it need not be sufficient (e.g., Graff-Radford et al 1990). As already described, however, there is evidence that pathology in more caudal thalamic nuclei can also impair recognition (e.g., Isaac et al 1998;Zoppelt et al 2003;Gold and Squire 2006;Soei et al 2008).…”

Section: Toward a Model Of Diencephalic Contributions To Recognition mentioning

confidence: 90%

“…The principal limitation is that clinical studies have failed to find evidence for a selective loss of familiarity-based recognition following damage to the medial dorsal nucleus (e.g., Zoppelt et al 2003;Cipolotti et al 2008;Soei et al 2008). Instead, clinical studies more often suggest that medial dorsal thalamic damage can induce frontal cortex-like deficits, e.g., in executive function (Van der Werf et al 2002, 2003a.…”

Section: Toward a Model Of Diencephalic Contributions To Recognition mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The nonrelational test asked participants to identify novel viewpoints of familiar objects. The relational tasks appeared more sensitive to the thalamic pathology (Soei et al 2008), suggesting that, in some cases, damage to the medial dorsal region can disrupt associative recognition of the sort likely to tax recollective-based recognition.…”

Section: Intralaminar and Midline Thalamic Nucleimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Candidates include (1) the medial pulvinar nucleus, because of its dense inputs from medial temporal structures and sensory association cortex; (2) the reticular nucleus, because of its intra-thalamic connections; and (3) the ventral lateral thalamic nucleus, because of its apparent contribution to recognition loss after caudal thalamic injury (Zoppelt et al 2003;Soei et al 2008). At present, there is insufficient evidence to presume the importance of these other diencephalic nuclei, but the advent of better functional imaging may help to reveal the cortical-subcortical interplay that involves multiple groups of nuclei and contributes both directly and indirectly to recognition memory.…”

Section: Toward a Model Of Diencephalic Contributions To Recognition mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A further study of ten patients with ischemic thalamic lesions involving the medial dorsal nucleus and/or the ventrolateral nucleus compared performance on "relational" and "nonrelational" recognition memory tests (Soei et al 2008). The relational tests (which examined the recognition of novel spatial configurations of familiar objects and novel pairing of familiar objects) were designed to tax associative recognition.…”

Section: Intralaminar and Midline Thalamic Nucleimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unraveling the contributions of the diencephalon to recognition memory: A review

Aggleton¹,

Dumont²,

Warburton³

2011

Learn. Mem.

137

111

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Both clinical investigations and studies with animals reveal nuclei within the diencephalon that are vital for recognition memory (the judgment of prior occurrence). This review seeks to identify these nuclei and to consider why they might be important for recognition memory. Despite the lack of clinical cases with circumscribed pathology within the diencephalon and apparent species differences, convergent evidence from a variety of sources implicates a subgroup of medial diencephalic nuclei. It is supposed that the key functional interactions of this subgroup of diencephalic nuclei are with the medial temporal lobe, the prefrontal cortex, and with cingulate regions. In addition, some of the clinical evidence most readily supports dual-process models of recognition, which assume two independent cognitive processes (recollective-based and familiarity-based) that combine to direct recognition judgments. From this array of information a "multi-effect multinuclei" model is proposed, in which the mammillary bodies and the anterior thalamic nuclei are of preeminent importance for recollective-based recognition. The medial dorsal thalamic nucleus is thought to contribute to familiarity-based recognition, but this nucleus, along with various midline and intralaminar thalamic nuclei, is also assumed to have broader, indirect effects upon both recollective-based and familiarity-based recognition.Clinical studies repeatedly show that diencephalic pathology can impair recognition memory. Even so, there is no agreed locus within the diencephalon responsible for this memory loss and, hence, no agreed mechanism to explain the impairment. The present review examines both clinical and animal findings, and from this information a multi-effect multi-nuclei (MEMN) model emerges to explain the contributions of the diencephalon to recognition memory.At the outset, it is necessary to refine the focus of this review and to define some of its principal terms. The diencephalon comprises the thalamus and hypothalamus but, as will be explained, only the more medial parts of the diencephalon will be considered in detail. Recognition memory refers to the ability to detect whether a stimulus (e.g., a word, face, picture, object, or sound) has previously been encountered. As a consequence, this review is not about item identification (sometimes also confusingly referred to as recognition). Likewise, conditions that have broad disruptive effects on cognition, e.g., dementia, will not be considered even though recognition is typically impaired. Distinctions will be made between "item recognition," where the task is to determine if an individual item is novel or familiar, and "associative recognition," where all the individual items being experienced are familiar, but their particular combination is novel. A further, distinct ability is "recency" discrimination-the ability to determine which of two familiar stimuli has been experienced more recently. Both studies of amnesia and electrophysiological recordings show how recency memory and recogniti...

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