[The anatomy of episodic memory: evolution of concepts]

Historically, the hippocampus belongs to the limbic lobe described by Broca or to the Papez circuit. His role was first restricted to emotions. The observations that medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage led also to mnemonic dysfunction have been advanced greatly by the study of brain-damaged patients and experimental animals studies. Functional imaging, either positron emission tomography or functional MRI, has helped to change this historical concepts. Recent findings have converged on the observation that hippocampal or parahippocampal regions could be consistently activated in verbal or visuospatial memory paradigms. Furthermore, these functional neuroimaging studies have also stressed the importance of the prefrontal cortical activations in such memory processes. These results show that memory is subserved by a more widely distributed cortical network than expected.