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Biomedical subjects

M Mishkin

Publications and source records attributed to M Mishkin.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Verbal memory impairment after right temporal lobe surgery: role of contralateral damage as revealed by 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy and T2 relaxometry.

We assessed performance on selected tests of verbal memory in 48 patients who had undergone either anterior temporal lobectomy or selective amygdalo-hippocampectomy for the relief of pharmacologically intractable epilepsy. We related performance both to the side of surgical excision and to the presence or absence of abnormalities in the contralateral, unoperated, temporal lobe, as revealed by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H MRS) or T2 relaxometry. There were abnormalities on the unoperated side detected by 1H MRS in 50% of the 34 patients who successfully underwent spectroscopy, and by T2 relaxometry in 33% of the complete series of 48 patients. There was no systematic relationship between seizure outcome and the presence or absence of abnormalities on the unoperated side. Verbal memory deficits were present in patients with left-sided excision, regardless of whether there were abnormalities on the unoperated side. The patients with right-sided excision also had verbal memory deficits, but only in the group with magnetic resonance abnormalities on the contralateral (ie, left) side and only on delayed recall. The study extends previous findings on the role of the temporal lobes in memory and highlights the role of these new magnetic resonance techniques in relating cognitive processes to brain structures.

Adult↗

Stimulus recognition.

This review covers recent research on the neural process through which a novel stimulus becomes familiar. Lesion and recording studies have provided data sufficient to outline a tentative stimulus-recognition circuit and to suggest how the circuit might operate to form the new and relatively lasting stimulus traces that must underlie delayed stimulus recognition. The research has reached a stage where further progress could well be hastened by interaction between experiment and the formal, neurobiologically constrained models that are beginning to appear.

Animals↗

Agnosia, alexia and a remarkable form of amnesia in an adolescent boy.

Childhood cases of global anterograde amnesia, visual agnosia or alexia without agraphia, either alone or in any combination, are extremely rare. Here we report the case of a male adolescent, Neil (a pseudonym), who consequent to a pineal tumour began to exhibit all three disorders in the presence of normal verbal intelligence. The most surprising aspect of Neil's case, however, is his ability to retrieve postmorbid memories through the act of writing without being able to provide any oral account of the content of his written reports. His memory retrieval thus has some of the character of 'automatic writing'. This evidence pointing to Neil's possession of a dissociated form of episodic memory presents a new challenge to our understanding of the organization of memory and of the cerebral systems underlying it.

Adolescent↗

Effects of selective neonatal temporal lobe lesions on visual recognition memory in rhesus monkeys.

Ten-month-old infant monkeys that had received neonatal ablations of either inferior temporal cortex (area TE) or the medial temporal region were compared with age-matched normal infant monkeys in visual delayed nonmatching-to-sample with trial-unique objects. Both types of early damage caused impairment in visual recognition, but the degree of deficit after early area TE lesions differed sharply from that after early medial temporal removals. Thus, whereas early medial temporal damage yielded a marked decline in visual recognition when the delays and lists were gradually increased, early area TE damage yielded normal recognition up to a delay of 60 sec and only mild impairment at longer delays and lists. The data indicate that, unlike adult monkeys, which suffer severe and nearly equivalent losses in visual object recognition after both types of ablation, the infant monkeys' recognition ability is largely spared after early damage to area TE but not after early damage to the medial temporal lobe. Together with recent clinical reports of profound memory loss in children with early dysfunction of the medial temporal region, the present findings demonstrate that medial temporal lobe structures operate early to sustain visual recognition memory, and recovery from early damage is limited at best. Early damage to higher-order visual cortex, however, can be largely compensated, presumably by one or more of the visual cortical areas that were left intact.

Animals↗

A modality-specific somatosensory area within the insula of the rhesus monkey.

Response properties of neurons in the monkey's granular insula (Ig) were examined with somatic, auditory, visual, and gustatory stimuli. Results indicate that a major portion of Ig is a somatic processing area exclusively, with units that have large and often bilateral receptive fields, consistent with the view that this area serves as a higher-order, modality-specific link in the somatosensory-limbic pathway.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Scopolamine impairs recall of one-trial stimulus-reward association in monkeys.

Performance of three rhesus monkeys on a test of one-trial stimulus-reward association, in which recall intervals ranged from 0.5 to 6.5 min, was evaluated during nondrug-control conditions and following administration of the muscarinic-receptor blocker scopolamine. During control sessions, performance averaged 78% correct responses. Following administration of 10.0 and 17.8 micrograms/kg of scopolamine, performance fell significantly, to 69% and 63% correct responses, respectively. This dose-dependent impairment in recall was similar to the impairment we reported previously in recognition. Although the results thus failed to support a suggestion derived from behavioral electrophysiological findings that stimulus-reward association might be more vulnerable to scopolamine than stimulus recognition, they provide additional evidence for a cholinergic contribution to cognitive memory.

Animals↗

Hippocampectomized monkeys can remember one place but not two.

In an earlier study by Parkinson et al. (J. Neurosci. 8, 4159-4167, 1988), hippocampectomized monkeys were found to be impaired on a task in which they were required to remember the spatial positions of trial-unique objects overlying two of the wells in a three-well test tray. There were two types of trial in the task. One type (object-place) required memory for the conjunction of object quality and object location, whereas the other (place only) required memory only for the location of the objects, i.e. independent of object quality. The hippocampectomized monkeys performed at near chance levels on both types of trials. The present study sought to determine whether the poor performance of the hippocampectomized monkeys on the place-only trials, which closely resembled spatial delayed response (an ability that is unaffected by hippocampectomy when similarly short delays are used), could have been due to interference from the simultaneous training they had received on the object-place trials. To this end, we examined the effect of hippocampal removals on performance of the "place-only" trial type when that was the only training given. The hippocampectomized monkeys in the present study were found to be just as severely impaired as those in the earlier study, thus ruling out the possible explanation outlined above. Since performance on this modified version of spatial delayed response, unlike performance on the classical version with the same delay, is critically dependent on the hippocampus, it appears that monkeys with hippocampectomy can remember one place after a short delay but not two.

Animals↗

Effects on visual recognition of combined and separate ablations of the entorhinal and perirhinal cortex in rhesus monkeys.

Performance on visual delayed nonmatching-to-sample was assessed in rhesus monkeys with combined and separate ablations of the perirhinal and entorhinal cortex, as well as in unoperated controls. Combined (i.e., rhinal cortex) lesions yielded a striking impairment on this task, one almost as severe as that seen after combined amygdalohippocampal removals that included some of this subjacent cortex (Mishkin, 1978; Murray and Mishkin, 1984). Ablations of the perirhinal cortex alone produced a deficit nearly as severe as that found after rhinal cortex lesions, whereas ablations of the entorhinal cortex alone produced only a mild deficit. Contrary to the conclusion from an earlier study (Murray and Mishkin, 1986), the present results demonstrate not only that damage limited to the rhinal cortex is sufficient to produce a severe loss in visual recognition, but also that such damage leads to a far greater loss than damage to any other single structure in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Animals↗

Visually guided reaching with the forelimb contralateral to a "blind" hemisphere: a metabolic mapping study in monkeys.

The 2-14C-deoxyglucose method was used to map local cerebral metabolic activity in monkeys performing a unimanual task requiring visually guided arm reaching and key pressing. The study was carried out with monkeys that either had intact brains or had one hemisphere deprived of visual input by unilateral optic tract section combined in some cases with forebrain commissurotomy. The metabolic mapping revealed activation of sensorimotor cortex only in the hemisphere contralateral to the moving forelimb, irrespective of whether this hemisphere was intact or visually deafferented. These results suggest that visually guided reaching with the forelimb contralateral to the "blind" hemisphere is subserved by that hemisphere's sensorimotor cortex and not by the cortex of the ipsilateral, "seeing" hemisphere. Other areas that were more active metabolically in the "blind" than in the "seeing" hemisphere included the supplementary motor, the secondary somatosensory, and certain posterior parietal cortical areas, intraparietal lateral 5 (lateral 5-ip), 7a, and intraparietal 7 (7-ip). It is suggested that the "blind" hemisphere utilizes at least two distinct pieces of information to guide forelimb movements to visual targets: (1) information about the location of the visual target derived from head and eye movements made to this target and mediated via the inferior parietal cortical areas 7a and 7-ip, and (2) information about the instantaneous upper extremity position derived from forelimb proprioceptive mechanisms and mediated via the somatosensory cortex and thereafter via the superior parietal cortical area, lateral 5-ip.

Animals↗

Neural substrates of visual stimulus-stimulus association in rhesus monkeys.

Rhesus monkeys learned 10 visual stimulus-stimulus association, or paired associates. They then received bilateral removals of either the amygdaloid complex and underlying cortex, the hippocampal formation and underlying cortex, or both combined, or they were retained as unoperated controls. After surgery or rest, the monkeys were tested for their retention of the preoperatively learned set of paired associates, as well as for their ability to learn new associations of the same type. Both unoperated controls and hippocampectomized monkeys relearned the preoperatively trained set of paired associates almost immediately. By contrast, monkeys with amygdala removals were moderately retarded in relearning, and monkeys with combined amygdala and hippocampal ablations were severely retarded. When confronted with new sets of visual stimuli, monkeys with amygdala removals or hippocampal removals learned new sets of paired associates at the same rate as the controls, whereas monkeys with the combined ablation were again profoundly retarded. Only one monkey with the combined lesion was able to learn new stimulus-stimulus associations to criterion, and then only after extensive training, despite the ability of all three animals in this group to perform delayed matching-to-sample with the same stimuli and the same intraatrial delays as those used in the paired associate task. At the end of the main experiment, two of the unoperated controls received bilateral ablations of the rhinal cortex. These monkeys showed the same level of difficulty in learning new paired associates as the animals in the main experiment that had received the combined amygdala plus hippocampal ablations. The results implicate the medial temporal lobe, and particularly the rhinal cortex, in the formation of stimulus-stimulus associative memories.

Amygdala↗

Serial and parallel processing of tactual information in somatosensory cortex of rhesus monkeys.

1. Selective ablations of the hand representations in postcentral cortical areas 3a, 3b, 1, and 2 were made in different combinations to determine each area's contribution to the responsivity and modality properties of neurons in the hand representation in SII. 2. Ablations that left intact only the postcentral areas that process predominantly cutaneous inputs (i.e., areas 3b and 1) yielded SII recording sites responsive to cutaneous stimulation and none driven exclusively by high-intensity or "deep" stimulation. Conversely, ablations that left intact only the postcentral areas that process predominantly deep receptor inputs (i.e., areas 3a and 2) yielded mostly SII recording sites that responded exclusively to deep stimulation. 3. Ablations that left intact only area 3a or only area 2 yielded substantial and roughly equal reductions in the number of deep receptive fields in SII. By contrast, ablations that left intact only area 3b or only area 1 yielded unequal reductions in the number of cutaneous receptive fields in SII: a small reduction when area 3b alone was intact but a somewhat larger one when only area 1 was intact. 4. Finally, when the hand representation in area 3b was ablated, leaving areas 3a, 1, and 2 fully intact, there was again a substantial reduction in the encounter rate of cutaneous receptive fields. 5. The partial ablations often led to unresponsive sites in the SII hand representation. In SII representations other than of the hand no such unresponsive sites were found and there were no substantial changes in the ratio of cutaneous to deep receptive fields, indicating that the foregoing results were not due to long-lasting postsurgical depression or effects of anesthesia. 6. The findings indicate that modality-specific information is relayed from postcentral cortical areas to SII along parallel channels, with cutaneous inputs transmitted via areas 3b and 1, and deep inputs via areas 3a and 2. Further, area 3b provides the major source of cutaneous input to SII, directly and perhaps also via area 1. 7. The results are in line with accumulating anatomic and electrophysiologic evidence pointing to an evolutionary shift in the organization of the somatosensory system from the general mammalian plan, in which tactile information is processed in parallel in SI and SII, to a new organization in higher primates in which the processing of tactile information proceeds serially from SI to SII. The presumed functional advantages of this evolutionary shift are unknown.

Animals↗

Massive cortical reorganization after sensory deafferentation in adult macaques.

After limited sensory deafferentations in adult primates, somatosensory cortical maps reorganize over a distance of 1 to 2 millimeters mediolaterally, that is, in the dimension along which different body parts are represented. This amount of reorganization was considered to be an upper limit imposed by the size of the projection zones of individual thalamocortical axons, which typically also extend a mediolateral distance of 1 to 2 millimeters. However, after extensive long-term deafferentations in adult primates, changes in cortical maps were found to be an order of magnitude greater than those previously described. These results show the need for a reevaluation of both the upper limit of cortical reorganization in adult primates and the mechanisms responsible for it.

Afferent Pathways↗

Dissociation of object and spatial visual processing pathways in human extrastriate cortex.

The existence and neuroanatomical locations of separate extrastriate visual pathways for object recognition and spatial localization were investigated in healthy young men. Regional cerebral blood flow was measured by positron emission tomography and bolus injections of H2(15)O, while subjects performed face matching, dot-location matching, or sensorimotor control tasks. Both visual matching tasks activated lateral occipital cortex. Face discrimination alone activated a region of occipitotemporal cortex that was anterior and inferior to the occipital area activated by both tasks. The spatial location task alone activated a region of lateral superior parietal cortex. Perisylvian and anterior temporal cortices were not activated by either task. These results demonstrate the existence of three functionally dissociable regions of human visual extrastriate cortex. The ventral and dorsal locations of the regions specialized for object recognition and spatial localization, respectively, suggest some homology between human and nonhuman primate extrastriate cortex, with displacement in human brain, possibly related to the evolution of phylogenetically newer cortical areas.

Adult↗

Transient impairment of recognition memory following ibotenic-acid lesions of the basal forebrain in macaques.

To assess the contributions of the basal forebrain cholinergic nuclei to visual recognition memory in macaques, we compared the effects of lesions of (a) the nucleus basalis of Meynert, (b) the medial septal and diagonal band nuclei, and (c) all nuclei combined on performance of delayed nonmatching-to-sample with trial-unique stimuli. Whereas monkeys with the separate lesions did not differ from each other or from normal control animals, those with combined lesions showed a significant impairment. With time and extended practice, however, the performance of the animals with combined lesions recovered to normal levels. During the recovery period, these monkeys showed an initially increased sensitivity to scopolamine that later dissipated, at which time they also failed to show the improvement that follows physostigmine administration in normal animals. Postmortem assessment of cortical choline acetyltransferase activity revealed that only the group with combined lesions had significant depletion of this enzyme. The results suggest that (1) the basal forebrain cholinergic system participates in mnemonic processes in primates and that (2) extensive damage to this system is necessary before impairments in recognition memory, even transient ones, can be observed.

Acetylcholinesterase↗

The role of the inferior prefrontal convexity in performance of delayed nonmatching-to-sample.

Findings in an earlier study (Bachevalier, J. and Mishkin, M. Behav. Brain Res. 20, 249-261, 1986) indicated that ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which receives thalamic projections from the limbo-diencephalic system, is critical for visual recognition; whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which receives no such thalamic projections, makes little or no contribution to this type of memory. In the present study, we examined the role in recognition of another prefrontal area outside the thalamic projection zone of the limbo-diencephalic system, namely, the inferior prefrontal convexity. In the first experiment, monkeys with lesions of this cortex (Group IC) were found to be impaired in relearning delayed nonmatching-to-sample (DNMS), but not on the subsequent DNMS performance test in which memory demands were greatly increased. In a second experiment, monkeys with combined lesions of the inferior and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Group LAT) were also found to be impaired in relearning DNMS, but in this case they were impaired, in addition, on the subsequent performance test. Neither group (IC or LAT) showed retardation in acquiring visual discrimination habits. Analysis of the DNMS behavior of both groups suggested that their deficits on this task were due not to a loss in recognition memory, but to various forms of perseverative interference. The results support the view that the inferior prefrontal convexity, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, lies outside the limbo-diencephalic memory system not only anatomically but also functionally.

Animals↗

Comparison of the effects of scopolamine administered before and after acquisition in a test of visual recognition memory in monkeys.

The effect of scopolamine on visual recognition memory in rhesus monkeys was assessed with a delayed nonmatching-to-sample task employing trial-unique stimuli. During the acquisition phase, 40 sample stimuli were presented sequentially. During the test phase, these same stimuli were presented in the reverse order, each paired with a novel stimulus. The animal was rewarded for choosing the novel stimulus in each pair. Two versions of this design were used. In Task 1, scopolamine (10.0 or 17.8 micrograms/kg) was administered 20 min prior to acquisition, which was followed immediately by the test phase. In Task 2, the drug was administered immediately after acquisition, which was followed 20 min later by the test phase. Performance was impaired in a dose-related manner in Task 1, but not at all in Task 2, indicating that the effects of scopolamine on performance cannot be attributed to an impairment either in the retrieval of stored information or in the attentive or perceptual discriminative processes needed for such retrieval, or, by implication, for storage. In addition, the forgetting curves for scopolamine in Task 1 were parallel to those of the control sessions; i.e., the curves did not diverge with increasing delay intervals, indicating that scopolamine did not increase the rate of forgetting. Taken together, the results suggest that scopolamine interferes selectively with the initial storage of the information to be remembered.

Animals↗

Visual impairments in macaques following inferior temporal lesions are exacerbated selectively by additional damage to superior temporal sulcus.

The present study examined the behavioural effects of removing the inferior temporal cortex (area TE) either on its own or in combination with the adjacent fundus and upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus (area STP). Comparisons with preoperative behaviour showed that the addition of superior temporal sulcal damage led to an increase in visual components of the Klüver-Bucy syndrome, i.e. an increased tendency to touch and examine objects coupled with a decrease in emotional reactivity, but no excessive orality, changes in food preference, or coprophagia. No group differences were found in the learning of 3 pattern discriminations, but the animals with additional superior temporal sulcal lesions were more impaired than the others on 3 colour discriminations, successive reversals of an object discrimination, and a learning-set task. These findings indicate that STP provides an important route, independent of the route via TE, by which visual information can reach limbic structures to evoke affective responses and contribute to visual learning.

Amygdala↗