Previous work suggests that visual long-term memory (VLTM) is highly detailed and has a massive capacity. However, memory performance is subject to the effects of the type of testing procedure used. The current study examines detail memory performance by probing the same memories within the same subjects, but using divergent probing methods. The…

Context memories initially require the hippocampus, but over time become independent of this structure. This shift reflects a consolidation process whereby memories are gradually stored in distributed regions of the cortex. The function of this process is thought to be the extraction of statistical regularities and general knowledge from specific…

Patient H.M. can form new memories and maintain them for a few seconds before they fade away. From a neurobiological perspective, this amnesia is usually attributed to the absence of memory consolidation, that is, memory storage. An alternative view holds that this impairment reflects that the memory is present but cannot be retrieved. This debate…

Whisker deflection is an effective conditioned stimulus (CS) for trace eyeblink conditioning that has been shown to induce a learning-specific expansion of whisker-related cortical barrels, suggesting that memory storage for an aspect of the trace association resides in barrel cortex. To examine the role of the barrel cortex in acquisition and…

Transcriptional activation is a key process required for long-term memory formation. Recently, the transcriptional coactivator CREB-binding protein (CBP) was shown to be critical for hippocampus-dependent long-term memory and hippocampal synaptic plasticity. As a coactivator with intrinsic histone acetyltransferase activity, CBP interacts with…

Studies of memory impairment in humans and experimental animals have been fundamental to learning about the organization of memory and its cellular and molecular substrates. When memory impairment occurs, especially after perturbations of the nervous system, the question inevitably arises whether the impairment reflects impaired information…