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• pisodic memory impairment was evident across a broad range of tests that have been extensively used in studies of MTL amnesia (Bayley et al., 2003; Vann et al., 2009). In terms of anterograde memory, patients showed impaired visual and verbal recall and recognition memory, and pronounced forgetting of visual material. Examining retrograde amnesia, ...
• Patients showed impairment across all tests of visual and verbal recall and recognition memory. The only unimpaired form of memory was face recognition. This would be predicted by some material-specific accounts of recognition memory (Bird and Burgess, 2008) and is consistent with the view that recognition of unfamiliar faces is exceptional in seve...
• The only aspect of amnesia upon which HPC atrophy showed a direct effect was that of visual forgetting (of abstract shapes). Patients showed only a marginal increase in verbal forgetting. In particular, it was the atrophy in the right HPC that was associated with visual forgetting. This is consistent with evidence for HPC lateralization of maintena...
• Our findings would at first sight appear to support a role for the HPC in the recollection of remote autobiographical memories. However, the volume of the left thalamus correlated with remote autobiographical memory scores over and above HPC volumes across patients. Moreover, the effects of HPC atrophy were fully mediated by the volume reduction in...
• The absence of direct effects of HPC atrophy on remote memory, in combination with the selective presence of such effects on forgetting rates, is instead consistent with the idea that HPC circuitry acts as a buffer for the temporary maintenance of episodic information, with non-HPC structures storing more permanent memory traces. Our findings may t...

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