A comparison of egocentric and allocentric spatial memory in medial temporal lobe and Korsakoff amnesics

Holdstock, J. S., Mayes, A.R., Cezayirli, E., Aggleton, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5573-1308 and Roberts, N. 1999. A comparison of egocentric and allocentric spatial memory in medial temporal lobe and Korsakoff amnesics. Cortex 35 (4) , pp. 479-501. 10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70814-1

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Two patients with medial temporal lobe damage, seven Korsakoff amnesics and fourteen healthy control subjects were tested on three conditions of a spatial memory test (‘short delay’, ‘allocentric’ and ‘egocentric’). The task required subjects to recall the position of a single spot of light presented on a board after various delays. The ‘short delay’ condition tested memory over very short, unfilled intervals. The other two conditions used longer, filled delays. The allocentric condition required subjects to move to a different place around the board before recalling the position of the light. In the egocentric condition stimuli were presented in darkness, which eliminated allocentric cues. The Korsakoff amnesics were impaired at all delays of the short delay tasks, suggesting poor encoding. On the allocentric and egocentric tasks the Korsakoff amnesics showed a comparable impairment in the two conditions, which worsened with delay. This accelerated forgetting suggested that the Korsakoff amnesics also had impaired memory for allocentric and egocentric information. The patients with medial temporal lobe damage were unimpaired in the ‘short delay’ condition suggesting intact encoding and short-term memory of spatial information. However, they were impaired in the allocentric condition and showed accelerated loss of allocentric spatial information. In the egocentric condition, while the performance of one patient was impaired, the performance of the other was as good as controls. This result suggests that, in contrast to allocentric spatial memory, which is sensitive to medial temporal lobe damage, an intact medial temporal lobe need not be necessary for successful performance on an egocentric spatial memory task.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Medicine Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Amnesia ; Egocentric ; Allocentric ; Spatial ; Memory
Publisher:	Elsevier Masson
ISSN:	0010-9452
Last Modified:	18 Oct 2022 12:51
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/11426

Citation Data

Cited 60 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item