What is the hippocampal role in topographical processing for perception and memory?
Two of the four focal hippocampal patients (RH, Jon) showed deficits in both topographical memory and topographical perception, as consistent with a role for the hippocampus in on-line processing of topographical information (see also Lee et al., 2005a). However, the preserved performance of the other two focal hippocampal patients (VC and KC3) show that an intact hippocampus is not critical for the topographical tasks until a brief delay is introduced, in which case all of the hippocampal patients are impaired. Importantly, and by contrast to the traditional association of the hippocampus with long-term declarative memory, the delay used in the topographical memory task was only 2 seconds. Consistent with the traditional view, amnesics such as VC are often able to maintain working memory in a range of other tasks involving brief delays such as digit span or Corsi’s block span (Milner, 1971; Cave & Squire, 1992). As we argued in the Introduction, many visuo-spatial stimuli can be suppo
