Visual Exploration and the Primate Hippocampal Formation

During the 1990s and early 2000s, research in humans and in the nonhuman primate model of human amnesia revealed that tasks involving free viewing of images provided an exceptionally sensitive measure of recognition memory. Performance on these tasks was sensitive to damage restricted to the hippocampus as well as to damage that included medial temporal lobe cortices. Early work in my laboratory used free-viewing tasks to assess the neurophysiological correlates of recognition memory, and the use of naturalistic visual exploration opened rich avenues to assess other aspects of the impact of eye movements on neural activity in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. Here, I summarize two main lines of this work and some of the stories of the trainees who made essential contributions to these discoveries.