ABSTRACT
The adverse effects of medial temporal lobe damage on memory have been known since the last century (see Parkin & Leng, 1993) but, for most psychologists, this fact remained largely unknown, and thus of little consequence, until the mid-1950s. There were a number of reasons for this. First, papers describing the effects of temporal lobe damage were mainly confined to the neurological literature and many appeared in languages other than English. Second, the intellectual climate of psychology in the first half of the century was not one in which the intriguing consequences of this form of damage might have been appreciated. During this period psychology was dominated by behaviourism and even those behaviourists who chose to look at humans used paradigms that stressed input-output relationships rather than making any attempt to specify the structural organisation and internal processes of human memory.
