Amnesia and Language
Modified: 2026-02-07 3:33 PM CST
Scoville and Milner (1957) opened the door to subsequent work in neurophysiology related to the function of the hippocampus. Chomsky provided one of the foundations of cognitive psychology: psycholinguistics
Chapter 7 Amnesia: Beyond Scoville and Milner's (1957) Research on HM--Howard Eichenbaum and Neal J. Cohen
- Background to the Classic Study
- Detailed Description of the Classic Study
- Patient H.M.
- Scoville and Milner (1957)
- Ten cases in their paper
- Bilateral resection of medial temporal lobe, amygdala, portions of the hippocampus, and parts of surrounding cerebral cortex
- H.M.'s results led to:
- Severe anterograde amnesia
- Retrograde amnesia for immediate past (total for previous 19 months, partial for events as far a three years back)
- No loss of general world knowledge or childhood memories
- Bilateral hippocampal damage was key (loss of 8 cm or more)
- Radical damage to hippocampus did not affect perception, intellect, or personalityse
- Kardas 1996 brain surgery (Not on test)
- In 1996 I began to notice strange things. I could not put dishes away without first opening the cabinets. I got sudden headaches. I took long-ranging tours around a subject while lecturing and thinking it was brilliant (it wasn’t). One day I could not feel the bubbles of a soft drink on my tongue. My wife felt them. I tried it again and could feel the bubbles on the right side of my tongue only. A very painful and sudden headache in class made me make an appointment with a neurologist in Little Rock. The MRI was shocking. The entire brain was curving to the left. In Houston the neurosurgeon, Dr. Hassenbusch, could not identify the type of tumor from the MRI. Ironically, he died of an inoperable brain tumor 12 years later.
- On the day before surgery the team asked if I was left-handed to assess the location of my brain’s language functions. I was not. If I had been left-handed they would have assigned further tests because 30% of left-handers have their language functions on the right side of their brains. Since then, I explain to the correlation between handedness and language function location to left-handers just in case they should ever need brain surgery.
- Early in the morning of my surgery I stood in line with a large number of other pre-op patients. The last thing I remember is counting backwards from 100, 99, 98, 97…
- I came out of the anesthesia badly. I imagined that I could look at people and their name would pop up over their head. “Wonderful,” I thought. I flew a landscape that was my mother’s face. I saw the devil, a nurse at the other end of the room. They brought my wife into post-op to calm me down. At that point we had two boys, then aged 3 and 5. When I saw her I told her, “Now we can have a girl.” In 1997 we did.
- In ICU my throat ached. I chewed ice. A year later I read my patient report, the intubation had only succeeded after they inserted the tube at an angle from the right side of my mouth to the left side of my trachea, the precise locations of the pain. Somehow a friend, Dean Allsman, convinced someone to put him through on the phone while I was still in post-op. Later the staff checked me and the other patients, asking us our names, the date, and the name of the president. The patient next to me, could not give the correct answers. He did not even know the year it was.
- I left the hospital with no hair on the right side of my head and with a screw hole just over my left eye where my head had been attached to the operating table. The tumor was a 3” cigar-shaped non-malignant meningioma. It’s good to survive to see our children grow up and to spend nearly 30 more happy years with my wife and family. Discussing the brain in class is different than having brain surgery. Brain surgeries are not that common. The Mayo Clinic estimates that in the United States in 2020 some 24,000 adults and 3,500 children in the United States will need brain surgery.
- Impact of the Classic Study
- Scoville saw to it immediately that bilateral hippocampus resections were no longer performed.
- H. M. following surgery, had:
- Intact perception
- Intact short-term memory and working memory
- Various aspects of cognition and general intellect
- Global anterograde amnesia
- Temporally sensitive retroactive amnesia
- Note that his retrograde amnesia dated from the onset of his seizures
- Critique of the Classic Study
- Hippocampal region is essential to memory
- Hippocampus involved in forming and retaining long-term memories
- Hippocampus is not involved in short-term and working memory or in remote (old) memories
- Specificity to the Domain of Memory
- Originally, the impact of Scoville and Milner's research was on the specificity of memory loss without any other deficits in cognition
- However, later research showed that hippocampal amnesia also affected:
- Perception of complex stimuli
- Discourse and language processing
- Future thinking and imagination
- Creative thinking
- Adaptive decision making
- Empathy and social cognition
- Amnesiacs:
- Cannot make perceptual judgments when stimuli overlap or are presented in fragmented form
- Are deficient in 'spontaneous revisitation' of multistimulus arrays presented in isolation
- In considering future scenarios, amnesiacs are deficient in richness of detail
- Show impoverished responses in creative thinking
- Specificity within the Domain of Memory
- H.M. could not form or retain long-term memories
- H.M.'s short-term and working memory abilities were not affected
- H.M. could carry on normal conversations
- H.M. could participate in psychological testing (as long as the testing did not require recent memories)
- H.M. could remember items from his remote past
- Recent research has focused on the following questions:
- Is short-term and working memory fully intact? (Thus, not related to hippocampal function.)
- How extensive is short-term memory loss following hippocampus damage?
- Is there a specific pattern to long-term memory deficits. (e.g., does it affect all long-term memory or only parts of it?)
- Is Short-Term or Working Memory Fully Intact in Amnesia and Thus Independent of Hippocampal Function?
- Hippocampal involvement begins early in learning in humans and animals (the subsequent memory effect)
- Hippocampus begins information processing supporting long-term memory during the learning experience
- Hippocampal neurons in rats and humans carry information about the temporal (timing) organization of events
- How Extensive is Retrograde Amnesia Following Hippocampal Damage, or Is It Limited to Recently Acquired Memory?
- Hippocampus plays a critical role in the formation of long-term memories but in a time limited fashion
- Hippocampus plays a role in the retrieval of specific autobiographical events before onset of amnesia
- However, memory of facts declines with age
- Hippocampus plays a large role in semantic representations across the lifetime
- Does Amnesia Impair the Formation of All Long-Term Memories or Is the Role of the Hippocampus Specific to a Particular Type or Form of Long-Term Memory?
- Hippocampal damage mostly affects declarative memory (who, what, where, and when of everyday events)
- Skills and habits, preferences, familiarities, dispositions can be fully spared in amnesiacs with hippocampal damage
- Results point to multiple memory systems which can interact with each other in various ways
- How Does the Hippocampal Region Support Memory?
- Eichenbaum: What H.M. Taught Us
- memory is a distinct psychological function
- amnesia spares short-term and working memory
- that amnesia is an impairment of declarative and episodic memory
- the hippocampus is a core brain structure supporting memory
- the hippocampus supports the permanent consolidation of memories
- Conclusions
- Scoville and Milner (1957) provided a framework for subsequent workers to understand how memory works and the importance and function of the hippocampus.
Chapter 15 Language: Beyond Chomsky's (1957) Syntactic Structures--Trevor Harley and Siobhan MacAndrew
- Background to the Classic Study
- Detailed Description of the Classic Study
- Impact of the Classic Study
- Joke: Junior was six years old and had yet to utter a world. One morning, ma and pa were discussing him at the kitchen table. Ma said, "Maybe it's time we sent Junior to a hospital Junior heard her and said, "Why would you do that?" Ma and Pa were astounded. Pa asked, "Why have you not spoken before?" Junior said, "Never had to before."
- That joke nicely illustrates the competence-performance distinction.
- The Competence-Performance Distinction
- Eventually, linguistics focused on competence and psychology on performance
- Psychologists used reaction time data to measure cognitive processing
- Later, psychologists developed computational models
- Those models ignored content and created rules for information flow
- Critique of the Classic Study
- Language Acquisition and Rationalism
- "Noam Chomsky argues along similar lines in presenting what he describes as a “rationalist conception of the nature of language” (1975, p. 129). Chomsky argues that the experiences available to language learners are far too sparse to account for their knowledge of their language. To explain language acquisition, we must assume that learners have an innate knowledge of a universal grammar capturing the common deep structure of natural languages." (From SEP)
- So, Chomsky first posits the LAD (language acquisition device) and later replaces it with Universal Grammar
- Note that Working Memory (to be covered in later chapters) can limit linguistic performance
- Gold's Theorem
- Mere exposure to a language will not allow child to learn that language
- Adults must provide teaching of non-sentences
- But, nearly all children in all cultural settings become accomplished speakers
- Yang and Piantadosi (2022). They propose a formal, computational, and positive learning model for language acquisition
- Chomsky's work is in the rationalist tradition
- Universals
- Are all languages the same? (At least in terms of Chomsky's theories.)
- One recent exception, Piraha, may weaken that idea.
- Text suggests more languages need be studied before sweeping statements about linguistic universals proposed.
- The Modularity of Mind and the Uniqueness of Human Language--Understanding:
- Nature of Computation
- Context
- Is "The house blew it." a legitimate sentence in English?
- What if I make the house a gambling house.
- What if I tell a story of how the croupier allowed me to raise the limit on the roulette wheel and I won $100,000?
- Did the house blow it?
- Role of Language
- All of the above are Chomskian contributions to psychology
- Modularity of Mind
- Think of the following sentences and parse them:
- Parse with "time" as a noun, "time" as an adjective, and "time" as a verb
- Fruit flies like a bannana
- Here "fruit" as an adjectve makes more sense
- What about Washoe, Kanzi, and Koko
- Today, even Chomsky acknowledges primate communication
- But he holds on to recursion as uniquely human
- For Chomsky, language, self-consciousness, and human identity are intertwined
- Alternative Approaches
- Connectionism
- Not rules, per se, rather statistical regularities
- Large interconnected networks with spreading activation from simple units
- Success in understanding:
- Reading
- Speech perception
- Semantics
- Speech production
- Development of past tense
- Alzheimer's
- Aphasias
- Empirical
- Modifiable
- Scalable
- Embodied Cognition
- Language is not special type of learning
- Rather, it emphasizes how:
- Interact with each other in complex ways
- Example: Think of childbirth. Men and women know the concept but women's environments (and experiences) make childbirth a very different event for them
- In a Human Sexuality class years ago I had mothers explain to non-mothers their experience of childbirth
- One mother said childbirth was like "shitting a watermelon"
- Prediction
- Think of Google and other apps that predict your requests. Are they always correct?
- Perhaps, mistakes made in language production and comprehension argue for simpler linguistic mechanisms
- See Pickering and Gambi (2018, Abstract)
- "We argue that they [comprehenders] most effectively predict using their production system (i.e., prediction-by-production): They covertly imitate the linguistic form of the speaker's utterance and construct a representation of the underlying communicative intention. Comprehenders can then run this intention through their own production system to prepare the predicted utterance. But doing so takes time and resources, and comprehenders vary in the extent of preparation, with many groups of comprehenders (non-native speakers, illiterates, children, and older adults) using it less than typical native young adults. We thus argue that prediction-by-production is an optional mechanism, which is augmented by mechanisms based on association."
- Conclusions
- Chomsky is a "great man" of science
- He brought language into cognitive psychology via psycholinguistics
- Some of his contributions include:
- Forcing psychologists into studying performance issues
- Emphasing the processes of cognition
- Exploring language by starting small
- Making space for language experiments
- Promoting the embodied cognition approach
- The study of language has benefitted greatly from neuroscience models
- Afterthought: Comment from Noam Chomsky
- Inquiry for languages requires:
- Studying individual languages
- Determining fixed principles of Universal Grammar and its range of options
- Understanding the nature of language and its acquistion are two related projects
Back to Main Advanced Cognitive Psychology