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Transverse patterning and human amnesia.

Timothy C Rickard1, Mieke Verfaellie, Jordan Grafman

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093, USA. trickard@ucsd.edu

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
|October 4, 2006
PubMed
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Patients with hippocampal damage show impaired configural learning on the transverse patterning (TP) task. This selective deficit supports the hypothesis that medial-temporal lobe damage impairs nonlinear learning, not just general task difficulty.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neurobiology

Background:

  • The transverse patterning (TP) task is used to test if medial-temporal lobe damage, particularly in the hippocampus, selectively impairs configural (nonlinear) learning.
  • Previous research generally supports this hypothesis in animal and human studies.
  • An alternative explanation suggests impaired TP performance in amnesia is due to task difficulty rather than a specific learning deficit.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To critique the alternative account proposed by Reed and Squire regarding TP task performance in amnesia.
  • To present new data from amnesic patients on an improved TP task to further test the configural deficit hypothesis.

Main Methods:

  • Critique of conceptual arguments and re-analysis of previous results.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Testing eight amnesic patients and controls on an improved transverse patterning task.
  • Assessing accuracy and learning patterns in patients with hippocampal and anterior thalamic nuclei damage.

    • Main Results:

    • Patients with bilateral hippocampal damage due to anoxia achieved only 54% accuracy on the TP task, significantly below the maximum possible (67%).
    • A patient with selective bilateral anterior thalamic nuclei damage showed near-maximal accuracy (67%) and specific learning patterns.
    • Results align with predictions of the configural deficit hypothesis.

    Conclusions:

    • The findings support the hypothesis that hippocampal damage selectively impairs configural learning.
    • Impaired performance on the TP task in amnesia is not merely a scaling artifact of task difficulty.
    • Damage to specific brain regions, like the hippocampus, leads to distinct patterns of learning impairment.