Epilepsy
The remember-know paradigm has been used to settle the debate over whether the hippocampus plays a critical role in familiarity of objects. Studies done with patients suffering from epilepsy suggest that the hippocampus plays a critical role in the familiarity of objects. A study was conducted using the remember-know distinction to understand this idea of familiarity and whether it is in fact the hippocampus that plays this critical role. This study found that the hippocampus is essentially a system based on familiarity. The hippocampus actually suppresses any sort of arousal response that would normally occur if the stimuli were novel. It is almost as though familiarity is a qualitative characteristic just as is colour or loudness.
The remember-know paradigm with epilepsy patients to distinguish whether a stimulus (picture of a face) was familiar. Patients that were found to have right temporal lobe epilepsy showed relatively lower face recognition response than those with left temporal lobe epilepsy due to damage of secondary sensory regions (including fusiform gyrus) in the brain's right hemisphere, which is responsible for perception and encoding (esp. face memory).
Read more about this topic: Remember Versus Know Judgements, Role of Remember-know Paradigm in Understanding Psychological Disorders
Famous quotes containing the word epilepsy:
“We are compelled by the theory of God’s already achieved perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the existence of evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.... Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)