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No effect of hippocampal lesions on stimulus-response bindings.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Henson, Richard N 
Horner, Aidan J 
Greve, Andrea 
Gregori, Mariella 

Abstract

The hippocampus is believed to be important for rapid learning of arbitrary stimulus-response contingencies, or S-R bindings. In support of this, Schnyer et al. (2006) (Experiment 2) measured priming of reaction times (RTs) to categorise visual objects, and found that patients with medial temporal lobe damage, unlike healthy controls, failed to show evidence of reduced priming when response contingencies were reversed between initial and repeated categorisation of objects (a signature of S-R bindings). We ran a similar though extended object classification task on 6 patients who appear to have selective hippocampal lesions, together with 24 age-matched controls. Unlike Schnyer et al. (2006), we found that reversing response contingencies abolished priming in both controls and patients. Bayes Factors provided no reason to believe that response reversal had less effect on patients than controls. We therefore conclude that it is unlikely that the hippocampus is needed for S-R bindings.

Description

Keywords

Amnesia, Hippocampus, Response learning, Adult, Aged, Analysis of Variance, Association Learning, Female, Hippocampus, Humans, Judgment, Male, Middle Aged, Neuropsychological Tests, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Reaction Time, Repetition Priming

Journal Title

Neuropsychologia

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0028-3932
1873-3514

Volume Title

103

Publisher

Elsevier BV
Sponsorship
James S McDonnell Foundation (220020333)
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/L02263X/1)
MRC (unknown)
Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00005/8)
Medical Research Council (MC_U105579226)