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The Relationship Between Episodic Memory and
Context: Clues from Memory Errors Made While Under Stress
L. NADEL, J.D. PAYNE, W.J. JACOBS
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Summary
In a series of studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jan
Bures introduced cortical spreading depression to the field of
behavioral neuroscience (eg. Bures 1960). This technique offered
a unique way to study the role of cortex in learning and memory,
and attracted the attention of many who began their graduate
studies at that time, including one of us (LN, cf. Nadel 1966).
An NIH postdoctoral fellowship to study with the master himself
brought LN to Prague in September 1967. Thus began a
relationship that included science, politics, and personal life,
and has lasted over 30 years1,2.
The first scientific exchange began with Jan pulling a piece of
paper from his desk with a long list of possible experiments
written on it -- “pick one”, he said. This led to a series of
studies on interhemispheric transfer of learning under
conditions of monocular input, demonstrating, amongst other
things, that such transfer is not a uniform process. Depending
on the kind of trials given with both hemispheres intact, and
the eye which remained open to input, transfer can either be
non-specific, likely involving some kind of procedural
knowledge, or highly specific, likely involving knowledge about
the trained discrimination itself (Nadel and Buresova, 1970).
These studies anticipated LN’s future work on multiple memory
systems, a research enterprise pursued in the following decades
by many labs (including LN’s: e.g. Nadel and O’Keefe 1974,
O’Keefe et al. 1975).
In this paper we focus on several scientific issues that Jan has
been thinking about for the past 25 years. In particular, we
consider spatial learning, the hippocampus, and memory. To this
mix we add stress, something well known to anyone living in
Prague in 1968.
LN left Prague after the 1968 invasion and stayed in London for
seven months, during which time arrangements were made for an
eventual return to the Medical Research Council Cerebral
Functions Research Group in 1970. Thus it was that LN happened
to be down the hall when John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky
discovered place cells (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky 1971) and began
the program of research leading to the cognitive map theory of
hippocampal function (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978).
Reprint
requests
DLynn Nadel, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ, USA.
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