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The relationship of recency discrimination to explicit memory and executive functioning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2007

KEVIN J. MANNING ,
BARRY GORDON ,
GODFREY D. PEARLSON  and
DAVID J. SCHRETLEN
KEVIN J. MANNING
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland
BARRY GORDON
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland
GODFREY D. PEARLSON
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Hartford Hospital/Institute of Living, Hartford, Connecticut
DAVID J. SCHRETLEN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland
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Abstract

Recency discrimination has been conceptualized as an executive ability by some investigators and as an aspect of episodic memory by others. We compared the performance of 261 neurologically healthy adults on a recency discrimination task (RDT) with their performance on measures of executive functioning and explicit memory. Mean z-transformed raw scores were used to construct indices of visual and verbal explicit memory, fluency, and executive functioning. Analyses revealed that RDT performance correlated more closely with visual (r = 0.32; p < 0.001) and verbal memory (r = 0.25; p < 0.001) than with fluency (r = 0.16; p < 0.05) and executive functioning (r = 0.13; p < 0.05). These findings suggest that recency discrimination might be better understood as an aspect of episodic memory that is subserved primarily by hippocampal and medial temporal structures than as an executive function that is subserved primarily by prefrontal cortex. (JINS, 2007, 13, 710–715.)

Keywords

Temporal orderRecency discriminationPrefrontal cortexHippocampusExecutive functionEpisodic memory
Type
BRIEF COMMUNICATION
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , July 2007 , pp. 710 - 715
Copyright
© 2007 The International Neuropsychological Society

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