The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is traditionally considered to be a system that is specialized for long-term memory. Recent work has challenged this notion by demonstrating that this region can contribute to many domains of cognition beyond long-term memory, including perception and attention. One potential reason why the MTL (and hippocampus specifically) contributes broadly to cognition is that it contains relational representations—representations of multidimensional features of experience and their unique relationship to one another—that are useful in many different cognitive domains. Here, we explore the hypothesis that the hippocampus/MTL plays a critical role in attention and perception via relational representations. We compared human participants with MTL damage to healthy age- and education-matched individuals on attention tasks that varied in relational processing demands. On each trial, participants viewed two images (rooms with paintings). On “similar room” trials, they judged whether the rooms had the same spatial layout from a different perspective. On “similar art” trials, they judged whether the paintings could have been painted by the same artist. On “identical” trials, participants simply had to detect identical paintings or rooms. MTL lesion patients were significantly and selectively impaired on the similar room task. This work provides further evidence that the hippocampus/MTL plays a ubiquitous role in cognition by virtue of its relational and spatial representations and highlights its important contributions to rapid perceptual processes that benefit from attention.

内侧颞叶 (MTL) 传统上被认为是专门用于长期记忆的系统。最近的工作通过证明该区域可以对长期记忆之外的许多认知领域做出贡献，包括感知和注意力，对这一概念提出了挑战。MTL（特别是海马体）对认知有广泛贡献的一个潜在原因是它包含关系表征——经验的多维特征及其彼此之间独特关系的表征——这在许多不同的认知领域都很有用。在这里，我们探讨了海马体/MTL 通过关系表征在注意力和感知中发挥关键作用的假设。我们将 MTL 损伤的人类参与者与年龄和教育相匹配的健康个体在相关处理需求不同的注意力任务上进行了比较。在每次试验中，参与者查看两个图像（有绘画的房间）。在“相似房间”试验中，他们从不同的角度判断房间是否具有相同的空间布局。在“相似艺术”审判中，他们判断这些画作是否可能出自同一艺术家之手。在“相同”试验中，参与者只需检测相同的画作或房间即可。MTL 病变患者在类似的房间任务中受到显着和选择性的损害。