Declarative association in the perirhinal cortex

Declarative memories are our so-called daily language memories, which we are able to describe or explicitly experience through the act of remembering. This conscious recollection makes it possible for us to think about the future based on our previous experience (episodic memory) and knowledge (semantic memory). This cognitive function is substantiated by the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a hierarchically organized complex in which the perirhinal cortex and parahippocampal cortex provide item and context information to the hippocampus via the entorhinal cortex, and the hippocampus plays the main role in association and recollection. This conventional view provides an easily understood structure to the declarative memory system. However, neurophysiological studies reporting the activities of single neurons bring a more complicated view. In this article, I review single-unit studies, particularly those focused on the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus, and suggest that association processes for declarative memory are more distributed over the MTL areas. The perirhinal cortex represents both between-domain associations (e.g., item-reward, item-place and item-time) and within-domain associations (e.g., item-item) and contributes to both subcategories of declarative memory (i.e., episodic and semantic memory) in a way that is complementary with the hippocampus.