Hippocampus - Familiarity and Recollection

Professor Howard Eichenbaum explains that different brain structures within the medial temporal lobe support different memory processes, namely familiarity and recollection.

There is now a growing body of evidence that different brain structures within the medial temporal lobe support different memory processes, specifically the distinction between familiarity and recollection. So, there’s recent evidence, for example, from functional imaging studies in humans that the cortex immediately surrounding the hippocampus becomes highly active when one has a strong sense of familiarity for an item seen before. Whereas the hippocampus becomes very activated when one recalls the context in which items were seen before. Also, similarly in studies on animals; single cells within the cortex surrounding the hippocampus become activated, associated with the animal’s ability to express familiarity of items in the past where cells in the hippocampus become activated when items are remembered in the context in which they were experienced before.