The Neurophysiology of Memory

Recognition Memory
Has three requirements:
First, successful discrimination between the stimuli being used.
Second, maintenance of a representation of the to-be-remembered sample stimulus throughout
the trial.
Third, determination of whether the current test stimulus matches the stimulus held in memory
(matching).
Discrimination is accomplished by sensory-selective neurons in the medial temporal lobe.
Maintenance is accomplished by sustaining or reactivating the stimulus-selective response for the to-
be-remembered sample stimulus.
Matching is accomplished by match-suppression and match-enhancement in which ring by the
neurons that hold the response for the to-be-remembered sample stimulus is either decreased or
increased to complete the task.
Match-enhancement may serve as an active form of recognition memory because it enhances a
match between behaviorally relevant stimuli (i.e. the sample and the target).
Match-suppression can be sort of a priming by suppressing all the neuronal populations that do not
match the primed stimulus feature.
From human fMRI studies, priming decreases brain activation.
The idea of match-suppression being an active process can be seen if match-suppression is more
robust on correct trials and diminished on error trials. However, this is hard to test because animals
perform at a high accuracy. Maybe fMRI in humans? Somehow set performance level.
Familiarity effect: in the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices, repeated stimuli garner reduced ring rates.
Recognition Memory in the Hippocampal Formation
Memory signals in the hippocampal formation, unlike in the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices, show the
match-nonmatch discrepancy (i.e. matches garner greater ring rates than non-matches) for all stimuli.
The abstraction of the memory signal possibly denotes the role of the hippocampal formation as an
outcome (answer) generator to the question: are these two stimuli, the sample held in memory and
the current test sample, the same?
Miscellanous, yet important, information
Smell is used to study memory in rats, while vision is used in monkey studies because the monkeys
entorhinal and perirhinal cortices, which are selective for only particular stimuli, lack a lot of olfactory-
selective neurons while rats have an abundance.