In the present study, we investigated the effect of medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage on human decision making in the context of reward-based intertemporal choice. During intertemporal choice, humans typically devalue (or discount) a future reward to account for its delayed arrival (e.g., preferring $30 now over $42 in 2 months), but this effect is attenuated when participants engage in episodi...

BACKGROUND Chronic alcohol abuse is associated with a wide range of cognitive deficits. However, little is known about memory for real-life events (autobiographical memory) in non-amnesic alcoholic patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) non-amnesic alcoholics' ability to recall specific autobiographical memories and (b) their subjective experience when they access specific m...

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesic patients and, likewise, diencephalic (DNC) amnesic patients evidence a disproportionate deficit in memory for associations in comparison with memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we equated item recognition in amnesic and control participants and found that, under these conditions, associative recognition ...

We address the recent suggestion that the "hippocampal system" is important for understanding ambiguities in language (MacKay et al., J Cogn Neurosci 1998;10:377-394). Seven amnesic patients and 11 controls first decided whether a sentence was ambiguous and then tried to explain the ambiguity. Three amnesic patients with damage limited to the hippocampal formation and one amnesic patient with p...

Patients with frontal lobe lesions, amnesic patients with Korsakoff's syndrome, other (non-Korsakoff) amnesic patients, and control subjects were given tests of memory for temporal order. In the first experiment, subjects were presented with a list of 15 words and then asked to reproduce the list order from a random array of the words. In the second experiment, they were asked to arrange in chr...

Hippocampal lesions in rodents impair both object-place and odor-place associative memory. Subjects with hippocampal damage have impaired associative memory such as object-place memory. Whereas studies have investigated some types of associative memory, no investigation has specifically examined odor-place associative memory in subjects with well-defined amnesia. It is unknown whether amnesic s...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Although persistent amnesia due to bilateral limbic system infarction is well described, reports of amnesic syndromes due to unilateral stroke have appeared infrequently and unsystematically. We report six new cases and review previously published reports to expand and consolidate knowledge regarding amnesic stroke. CASE DESCRIPTIONS Six patients developed acute amnesia...