Memory is the fundamental human capacity that underlies our personality, mental life as well as our knowledge and motor skills that we use on a daily basis. Work with patient HM, beginning in the 1950s, established key principles on the organization of memory function in the human brain. This research revealed that a surgical procedure involving the removal of both hippocampi (performed to relieve HM from severe epilepsy) significantly impaired his ability to form new episodic memories, while his capacity to learn and remember new motor tasks remained intact. This seminal work introduced the idea of specialized memory systems that are functionally and anatomically independent. Declarative memory (including episodic and semantic memory) was identified as being dependent on the hippocampus, while non-declarative memory (such as procedural motor and perceptual memory) was considered independent of it. This dichotomy caused memory research to become fragmented, with studies on the neural mechanisms supporting declarative and procedural memories developing along separate lines. Nevertheless, recent evidence has led to a reassessment of this division by demonstrating that the hippocampus has roles extending beyond episodic memory. Accordingly, the current project proposes and tests an integrative framework that specifies the shared neural processes that support learning and memory across multiple memory systems.
At the conceptual level, the findings will offer the opportunity to reconsider the historical models of memory classification and develop more integrative views of memory organization in general and hippocampal functioning in particular. Over the last decades our understanding about the hippocampal contribution to learning and memory has greatly increased. The proposed research will reveal to what extent hippocampal coding principles also apply to the domain of procedural learning and therefore greatly advance the field of fundamental research in learning and memory. At the applicative level, my findings will contribute to the development of integrative treatments of both procedural and declarative memory deficits.
