This essay was written over a 23 hour period as part of a second year foundations of cognitive neuroscience exam in Psychology BSc at Lancaster University. Word limit was 2000 words.
This exam essay received an A grade.
Discuss the contribution of non-human research to our knowledge of the function of
the temporal lobe.
Word Count: 2000
, Practical advantages of research involving non-human participants, such as enabling
continuous control and observation of subjects as well as animals lack of self-awareness
reducing demand characteristics, non-human research has enabled development of
neuroscientific investigations beyond case studies of brain damaged individuals like Henry
Moliason (H.M.). This has contributed to our understanding of the function of the temporal
lobes and their key structures, such as the hippocampus and the perirhinal cortex, and have
been important in clarifying human research. Evidence from human case studies investigating
memory (e.g H.M.; Scoville & Milner, 1957) appeared to indicate correlations between
damage to the hippocampus and amnesia. Further research by Milner (1968) demonstrated
the damage H.M. sustained from his bilateral medial temporal lobectomy spared his implicit
learning skills such as priming, but severely impacted his long-term memory. Converging
evidence from Bechara et al. (1995) showed that patient W.C. still had a functioning implicit
memory despite their lack of explicit memory abilities. Building on these findings, animal-
models of amnesia have helped to advance our understanding of memory in the temporal
lobes and impacts of hippocampal damage.
Initially animal hippocampal experiments, like Kimble (1963) appeared futile; rats
with bilateral hippocampal lesions demonstrated normal performance on visual
discrimination tasks when compared to a control group, contrary to hypotheses based on
human case studies. Furthermore, rat performance was observed to be unimpaired when
using implicit learning tasks as the test measure (Clark and Isaacson, 1965). This was
replicated by Schmaltz and Isaacson (1966) giving merit to reliability to this finding.
Performance on active avoidance tasks was also unimpaired in lesioned rats (Isaacson,
Douglass and Moore, 1961; Kimura, 1958). These findings appeared to indicate that, in non-
human subjects at least, the hippocampus was not responsible for memory. However, such
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