%0 Journal Article
%T Accelerated forgetting of contextual details due to focal medio-dorsal thalamic lesion
%A Sicong Tu
%A Olivier Piguet
%A Michael Hornberger
%J Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
%D 2014
%I Frontiers Media
%R 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00320
%X Effects of thalamic nuclei damage and related white matter tracts on memory performance are still debated. This is particularly evident for the medio-dorsal thalamus which has been less clear in predicting amnesia than anterior thalamus changes. The current study addresses this issue by assessing 7 thalamic stroke patients with consistent unilateral lesions focal to the left medio-dorsal nuclei for immediate and delayed memory performance on standard visual and verbal tests of anterograde memory, and over the long-term (> 24 hrs) on an object-location associative memory task. Thalamic patients showed selective impairment to delayed recall, but intact recognition memory. Patients also showed accelerated forgetting of contextual information after a 24 hour delay, compared to controls. Importantly, the mammillothalamic tract was intact in all patients, which suggests a role for the medio-dorsal nuclei in recall and early consolidation memory processes.
%K Thalamus
%K anterograde memory
%K Stroke
%K Mammillothalamic tract
%K MRI
%U http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00320/abstract