The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

This paper reviews evidence from neuropsychological patient studies relevant to two questions concerning the functions of the medial temporal lobe in humans.The first is whether the hippocampus and the adjacent perirhinal cortex make different contributions to memory.Data are discussed from two patients with adult-onset bilateral hippocampal damage who show a sparing of item recognition relative to recall and certain types of associative recognition.It is argued that these data are consistent with Aggleton and Brown's (1999) proposal that familiarity-based recognition memory is not dependent on the hippocampus but is mediated by the perirhinal cortex and dorso-medial thalamic nucleus.The second question is…