Ontogenetic Development of Habit and Memory Formation in Primates

Abstract

Lesion studies in adult monkeys have suggested that an experience can enter into memory in two ways: as cognitive information stored in a cortico-limbo-thalamocortical system (involving the higher order sensory areas of cortex, the amygdala, hippocampus, and entorhinal cortex, the medial thalamic nuclei, or ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the basal forebrain) and as a habit stored perhaps in a cortico-striatal system (involving the sensory cortical areas and the caudate and putamen). Our studies of behavioral development in infant monkeys as well as those in human infants provide complementary evidence by suggesting that these two systems are developmentally dissociable, in that the cognitive memory system, assessed by the delayed non-matching to sample task, appears to mature considerably more slowly than the habit system, assessed by the concurrent visual discrimination task, a notion that has also been discussed recently by others (Nadel & Zola-Morgan, 1984; Rose, 1980). Furthermore, despite the late development of the cortico-limbo-diencephalic memory system, this chapter has presented evidence that some limbic-dependent memory processes, such as those required for success on the visual paired comparison task, develop extremely early. The notion that at least one type of recognition process mediated by the limbic system is present neonatally provides new insight into the normal development of memory processes and indicates the need to identify further the memory processes and substrates that become available to an infant at different time points during maturation. Such studies will help one day to determine the immaturity of structure or function that is responsible for the intriguing phenomenon of infantile amnesia, that is, the inability to recall the stimuli or events experienced in the first few years of life.