figshare
Browse
2014_CUNY_SBS_MD_JK.pdf (1.17 MB)

Hippocampal contributions to discourse processing: Findings from Amnesia

Download (1.17 MB)
poster
posted on 2016-07-12, 20:22 authored by Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Melissa Duff, Jake KurczekJake Kurczek

Brown-Schmidt, S., Kurczek, J., & Duff, M.C. (2014, March). Hippocampal contributions to discourse processing: Findings from amnesia.Poster presentation at the 26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbia, SC.

What is the contribution of the hippocampal dependent declarative memory system to on-line processing of reference in discourse?

WELL ESTABLISHED are the contributions of hippocampus to the formation of new enduring (long-term) memories (Ranganath, 2010; Squire, 1992), and its contributions to relational binding and representational flexibility (Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001).

EMERGING RESEARCH shows that hippocampus additionally contributes to on-line processing, even across minimal delays. Evidence from hippocampal imaging in healthy participants, and behavioral evidence from patients with bilateral hippocampal damage show:

- Activation of hippocampus in healthy participants for relational learning over short delays (Hannula & Ranganath, 2008), and during retrieval of items from working memory (Öztekin, McElree, Staresina, & Davachi, 2008).

- Degradation of relational representations in patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions over short delays (Hannula, Tranel, & Cohen, 2006) and in the processing of simple stimuli over short delays (Warren, et al. 2010).

THE PRESENT RESEARCH examines contributions of hippocampus to discourse:

- Our initial findings (Kurczek, Brown-Schmidt, & Duff, 2013) revealed profound deficits in ability of hippocampal amnesic participants to recruit discourse information from one sentence to resolve a pronoun in the subsequent sentence:

Mickey is playing the violin for Donald as the sun is shining overhead. He is wearing a yellow bracelet...

  • -  Modeled after previous research with healthy participants (Arnold, et al., 2000), we found that unlike healthy matched comparison participants, patients with hippocampal amnesia did not show a significant preference to interpret the pronoun as referring to the 1st- mentioned referent.

  • -  HereweaskwhetherthediscourserepresentationisENTIRELYLOSTinamnesia, or whether it is present, but WEAKENED. 

Funding

NIDCD RO1 DC011755

History