Bigger is better! Hippocampal volume and declarative memory performance in healthy young men

The importance of the hippocampus for declarative memory processes is firmly established. Nevertheless, the issue of a correlation between declarative memory performance and hippocampal volume in healthy subjects still remains controversial. The aim of the present study was to investigate this relationship in more detail. For this purpose, 50 healthy young male participants performed the California Verbal Learning Test. Hippocampal volume was assessed by manual segmentation of high-resolution 3D magnetic resonance images. We found a significant positive correlation between putatively hippocampus-dependent memory measures like short-delay retention, long-delay retention and discriminability and percent hippocampal volume. No significant correlation with measures related to executive processes was found. In addition, percent amygdala volume was not related to any of these measures. Our data advance previous findings reported in studies of brain-damaged individuals in a large and homogeneous young healthy sample and are important for theories on the neural basis of episodic memory.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Brain Structure and Function

• Publication date

  2012-12-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s00429-012-0497-zPMID 23269366PMCID 3889822
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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