It has been argued that the hippocampus supports cognition by virtue of its role in flexibly binding together distinct elements of experience. Such ‘relational processing’ enables us to (re)construct episodic representations of real or imagined events. The present study examined whether hippocampally mediated relational processing also contributes to the construction of semantic representations. To do so, we asked amnesic individuals with medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions including the hippocampus to generate hypothetical meanings for novel word compounds (e.g., cactus carpet), a task that requires existing concepts to be flexibly linked. The quality of definitions and number of features generated for the novel compounds were lower in patients with MTL lesions than in control participants. Whereas the subset of patients with lesions extending into lateral temporal cortex had additional difficulty generating meanings for pre‐existing compounds (e.g., bus station), patients with lesions limited to the MTL showed no such deficit, indicating that their impairment in the novel compound condition was not due to reduced access to semantic information. These findings suggest that the role of hippocampally mediated relational processing extends beyond the episodic domain to include the generation of novel semantic representations.

中文翻译：

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在内侧颞叶健忘症中，语义域中的关系处理受损。

有人认为，海马体支持认知，因为它可以灵活地将不同的经验元素结合在一起。这种“关系处理”使我们能够（重新）构建真实或想象事件的情节表征。本研究检验了海马介导的关系处理是否也有助于语义表征的构建。为此，我们要求患有内侧颞叶 (MTL) 病变（包括海马体）的健忘症患者为新词复合词（例如仙人掌地毯）生成假设含义，这项任务需要灵活地关联现有概念。MTL 病变患者的新化合物的定义质量和特征数量低于对照组参与者。虽然病变延伸到外侧颞叶皮层的患者亚群难以为先前存在的化合物（例如公交车站）产生意义，但病变仅限于 MTL 的患者没有表现出这种缺陷，表明他们在新的复合条件下受损不是因为减少了对语义信息的访问。这些发现表明，海马介导的关系处理的作用超出了情节领域，包括产生新的语义表征。