Memory, scene construction, and the human hippocampus

Abstract

Significance It has been suggested that the primary role of the hippocampus is to construct spatial scenes and further that memory impairments following hippocampal damage may be attributed to spatial processing demands in memory tasks. Two types of tasks have contributed evidence to this perspective: boundary extension and scene imagination. Boundary extension refers to the phenomenon whereby a scene is remembered as having an expanded background. Imagination tasks ask participants to mentally construct scenes. We tested patients with hippocampal damage on both types of tasks. They were intact at both boundary extension and imagination, although they remembered the tasks poorly. These results support the traditional view that the human hippocampus is primarily important for memory.