Fractionating the episodic buffer

The episodic buffer is a putative component of working memory proposed to account for several short-term memory functions, including unexpectedly preserved immediate prose recall by amnesic patients. Over the course of time, this component has increasingly become associated with binding functions. Considering recent findings regarding the performance of both memory-impaired and healthy individuals on the range of tasks purported to require the contribution of the episodic buffer, we suggest that it should be fractionated into two functional systems. One is a schematic store instantiated in brain areas responsible for conceptual and schema representations, which is likely to be hippocampus-independent, and preserved in the face of amnesia. In contrast, short-term maintenance of novel associative binding is likely to require the contribution of the hippocampus and may therefore not be functionally dissociable from long-term memory.