The hippocampus serves a critical role in declarative memory--our capacity to recall everyday facts and events. Recent studies using functional brain imaging in humans and neuropsychological analyses of humans and animals with hippocampal damage have revealed some of the elemental cognitive processes mediated by the hippocampus. In addition, recent characterizations of neuronal firing patterns ...

Althoughmemory is usually robust and accurate, different disease processes can disrupt memory and cause either distortions or outright failure. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the six basic memory systems, their relevant neuroanatomy (Figure 1) and the clinical disorders that disrupt them (Table 1). By ‘memory system’, wemean a way in which the brain processes information ...