Hippocampal damage disrupts referential processing

<div> <div> <div> <p>Kurczek, J., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Duff, M.C. (2013, April). Hippocampal damage disrupts referential processing. <i>Poster presentation at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference</i>, San Francisco, CA.</p><p>• Establishing and maintaining reference is a central component of language processing, as much of what we talk about involves referring to entities </p> <p>• Referential processing requires maintaining a representation of the unfolding discourse history and potential referents, and integration of information about referential form with rich representations of referential context (Tanenhaus et al., 1995; Brennan & Clark, 1996) </p> <p>• We have propose that the rapid relational binding and representational flexibility of the hippocampal declarative memory system affords the informational binding and integration necessary for referential processing (Duff & Brown-Schmidt, 2012) </p> <p>• Partial support for this claim comes from Kurczek and Duff (2012); amnesic patients produced fewer cohesive ties, the adequacy of their ties were more often judged to be incomplete, and ratings of their local coherence were consistently lower than comparison participants, and from Duff et al., 2011; use of definite references disrupted in amnesia </p> <p>• Combing eyetracking and neuropsychological methods, Current study extends this line of work to examine the role of the hippocampus in on-line referential processing </p> <p>• Specifically, does the contribution of the hippocampus extend to brief discourse histories and to items in discourse focus? </p> </div> </div>