Developing an animal model of human amnesia: the role of the hippocampus.

This review summarizes a series of experiments aimed at answering the question whether the hippocampus in rats can serve as an animal model of amnesia. It is recognized that a comparison of the functions of the rat hippocampus with human hippocampus is difficult, because of differences in methodology, differences in complexity of life experiences, and differences in the degree of hippocampal damage. Notwithstanding, rats and humans with hippocampal damage are similarly impaired on analogous tasks that assess spatial memory, spatial pattern separation, spatial configural and arbitrary associations, temporal order memory, temporal pattern separation, sequential learning, and temporal associations. These data suggest that the rat can serve as a model of memory dysfunction (amnesia) as it relates to spatial and temporal processing of new information.