Reorganization of associative memory in humans with long-standing hippocampal damage

Abstract

Conflicting theories have been advanced to explain why hippocampal lesions affect distinct memory domains and spare others. Recent findings in monkeys suggest that lesion-induced plasticity may contribute to the seeming preservation of some of these domains. We tested this hypothesis by investigating visuo-spatial associative memory in two patient groups with similar surgical lesions to the right medial temporal lobe, but different preoperative disease courses (benign brain tumours, mean: 1.8 ± 0.6 years, n = 5, age: 28.2 ± 4.0 years; hippocampal sclerosis, mean: 16.8 ± 1.9 years, n = 9, age: 38.9 ± 4.1 years). Compared to controls (n = 14), tumour patients showed a significant delay-dependent deficit in memory of colour–location associations. No such deficit was observed in hippocampal sclerosis patients, which appeared to benefit from a compensatory mechanism that was inefficient in tumour patients. These results indicate that long-standing hippocampal damage can yield significant functional reorganization of the neural substrate underlying memory in the human brain. We suppose that this process accounts for some of the discrepancies between results from previous lesion studies of the human medial temporal lobe.