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Category-Specific Item Recognition And The Medial Temporal Lobe, Christopher B. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Much neuropsychological and neuroimaging research has been focused on the contributions of different medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures to recognition memory. The majority of these studies have linked perirhinal cortex (PrC) to item recognition, whereas the hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex (PhC) have primarily been associated with the recollection of contextual detail pertaining to a specific prior stimulus encounter. Here, I report results from three fMRI studies that examined the neural correlates of item recognition with a specific focus on the relationship between such signals and category-specific effects in the MTL. In Chapter 2, I reveal that category-specific representations in both …