Authors:
Wei-Chun Wang
Michele Lazzara
Charan Ranganath
Robert T. Knight
Andrew P. Yonelinas
Date: 2010
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.009
PubMed: 21144998
Abstract:
The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is generally thought to be critical for explicit, but not implicit, memory. Here, we demonstrate that the perirhinal cortex (PRc), within the MTL, plays a role in conceptuallydriven implicit memory. Amnesic patients with MTL lesions that converged on the left PRc exhibited defi- cits on two conceptual implicit tasks (i.e., exemplar generation and semantic decision). A separate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in healthy subjects indicated that PRc activation during encoding of words was predictive of subsequent exemplar generation. Moreover, across subjects, the magnitude of the fMRI and behavioral conceptual priming effects were directly related. Additionally, the PRc region implicated in the fMRI study was the same region of maximal lesion overlap in the patients with impaired conceptual priming. These patient and imaging results converge to suggest that the PRc plays a critical role in conceptual implicit memory, and possibly conceptual processing in general.