Associative recognition and item recognition in amnesia

It has been hypothesised that the hippocampal regions are involved specifically in the encoding of associations between different kinds of information and in the recollection process of recognition memory. We examined the performance of two severely amnesic patients (AC and MR) with different kinds of lesions on three associative (one intra-modal and two inter-modal) recognition tasks and two item recognition tasks. AC was impaired on all the tasks, whereas MR was impaired on the associative tasks but had a preserved familiarity-based recognition. Combined with the etiology and the loci of the patients’ lesions, these results support partly the hypothesis.