RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The hippocampus is critical for spatial relational attention
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 765222
DO 10.1101/765222
A1 Nicholas A. Ruiz
A1 Michael R. Meager
A1 Sachin Agarwal
A1 Mariam Aly
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/18/765222.abstract
AB The hippocampus is traditionally considered to be a system that is specialized for long-term memory. Recent work has challenged this notion by demonstrating that this region can contribute to many domains of cognition beyond long-term memory, including perception and attention. One potential reason why the hippocampus contributes broadly to cognition is that it contains relational representations — representations of multidimensional features of experience — that are useful in many different cognitive domains. Here, we explore the hypothesis that the hippocampus plays a critical role in attention via its relational representations. We compared human participants with hippocampal damage to healthy age- and education-matched individuals on attention tasks that varied in the type and amount of relational processing required. On each trial, participants viewed two images (rooms with paintings). On room relational trials, they judged whether the rooms had the same spatial layout from a different perspective. On art relational trials, they judged whether the paintings could have been painted by the same artist. Control trials placed fewer demands on relational processing: Participants simply had to detect identical paintings or rooms. Patients with hippocampal damage were significantly impaired on the room relational task. Selective hippocampal lesions had comparable effects to more extensive medial temporal lobe damage, suggesting that the hippocampus itself plays a critical role in spatial relational attention. This work provides further evidence that the hippocampus plays a ubiquitous role in cognition by virtue of its relational representations, and highlights that spatial relations may be particularly important.