With the success of local features in object recognition, feature-set representations are widely used in computer vision and related domains. Pyramid match kernel (PMK) is an efficient approach to quantifying the similarity between two unordered feature-sets, which allows well established kernel machines to learn with such representations. However, the approximation of PMK to the optimal featur...

Disagreement exists in the literature over whether it is possible for new semantic (factual) information to be learned in the absence of episodic (event) memory. We report the case of R.S., a 49-year-old amnesic man, who we found to have acquired information about famous people, public events and new vocabulary during the 13-year period since he became amnesic, despite having no measurable ante...

Retrograde amnesia was assessed in demented and non-demented Parkinson's patients using a test of remote memory spanning the years from 1920-1979. Results indicated that the demented patients 1) scored significantly below normal controls and 2) had equal impairment for all time periods. This pattern was like that seen in other dementing illnesses (i.e., Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases), b...

The memory impairment of a patient suffering from functional retrograde amnesia was assessed both during the amnesic episode and after its termination. The patient's performance on a task tapping semantic memory was nearly identical on the two test occasions, but his performance on a task tapping episodic memory substantially changed across test sessions. Cueing procedures revealed that in spit...

In an artificial grammar learning task, amnesic patients classified test items as well as normal subjects did. Item similarity did not affect grammaticality judgments when similar and nonsimilar test items were balanced for the frequency with which bigrams and trigrams (chunks) that appeared in the training set also appeared in the test items. Amnesic patients performed like normal subjects. Th...

The human hippocampus is widely believed to be necessary for the rapid acquisition of new declarative relational memories. However, processes supporting on-line inferential word use ("fast mapping") may also exercise a dissociable learning mechanism and permit rapid word learning without the hippocampus (Sharon et al. (2011) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108:1146-1151). We investigated fast mapping in...