The hippocampus supports recognition memory for familiar words but not unfamiliar faces." Curr Biol 18(24

of the two items on the test stimulus was in the presentation list. The two subtests of the RMT allowed us to investigate whether or not recognition-memory deficits are a pervasive feature of hippocampal amnesia or whether performance de-pends upon the nature of the memoranda. Figure 1 shows the performance of patients and controls on the two subtests of the RMT. Overall, the patients ’ scores are served on the face recognition-memory subtest; patients’ scores were no different from the controls’. This is impressive when one considers that healthy adults generally obtain lower scores on the faces subtest than the words subtest (see [6] and Figure 1), ruling out a simple explanation of our results in terms of task difficulty. A number of studies have highlighted the fact that recognition memory for faces can be spared in hippocam-pal amnesia [11–15]. The finding is also consistent with a stud