ABSTRACT
How are memories acquired and how are they lost in amnesia? Which brain areas are involved and how do they interact? In 1881, The´odule Ribot discovered that recent memories, although apparently strongly encoded and most reliably accessed, are nonetheless the first ones to be lost in many forms of amnesia, whereas remote memories are more resistant to brain damage. Over a century of research has produced a large body of data that aims to further elucidate these questions. Important contributions have come from neurology, psychiatry, neurobiology, experimental psychology, and neuropsychology and consist of studies with brain-damaged patients, experimental animals, and healthy subjects. From a modeling point of view, this data set is very heterogeneous, with a low sampling rate and a high error rate. Is it still worthwhile to attempt to model these data?
