Neuroscience Letters 364 (2004) 71–75 The role of the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex in memory for contextual information Iwona Szatkowska a,∗ , Olga Szyma ´ nska b , Anna Grabowska a a Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Department of Neurophysiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, 3 Pasteur St., 02-093 Warsaw, Poland b Department of Neurosurgery, The Warsaw Medical University, 1A Banach St., 02-097 Warsaw, Poland Received 19 January 2004; received in revised form 3 March 2004; accepted 31 March 2004 Abstract There is a growing body of evidence that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is implicated in the new learning of visual items. Little is known, however, as to the involvement of that portion of the prefrontal cortex in the learning of temporal and spatial relationship of those items. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to investigate the role of the VMPFC in memory for temporal and spatial order. Patients who had undergone surgery of the anterior communicating artery aneurysm, and normal control subjects (C), participated in the study. The patients were subdivided into three groups: with resection of the left (LGR+) or right (RGR+) gyrus rectus, and without such a resection (GR-). Subjects were presented with two memory tests: a temporal order (TO) test and a spatial order (SO) test. In the TO test, the LGR+ and RGR+ groups performed worse than the C group, while the GR- group did not differ significantly from the C group. In the SO test, the LGR+ and RGR+ groups did not differ significantly from the C and GR- groups. However, the trend appears to be the same for both tests, although only the TO test provides statistically significant group differences. Our results thus suggest that the VMPFC is involved in memory for contextual information. Together with previous findings, the data suggest that the learning of the relationship between items as well as the learning of those items are mediated by overlapping areas of the VMPFC. © 2004 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: ACoA aneurysm; Gyrus rectus; Orbitofrontal cortex; Ventromedial prefrontal cortex; Context memory; Contextual information Episodic memory records information about specific events within the context of other events. Thus, the major aspects of events consist of their contents (what?), their location in space (where?), and their occurrence in time (when?). It is still unknown how memory for such content and contextual information is anatomically organized. How- ever, several studies have attributed a number of specific episodic memory processes to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). There is a growing body of evidence that the VMPFC is implicated in the content memory. Selective lesions to the orbital portion of the VMPFC (orbitofrontal cortex) have been shown to cause impairments in several object memory tasks [2,8,10,15,20]. Moreover, recent neu- roimaging studies have suggested the specific contribution of the orbitofrontal cortex to the new learning of visual material [5–7,14]. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +48-22-659-8571x395; fax: +48-22-822-5342. E-mail address: iwona@nencki.gov.pl (I. Szatkowska). Little is known as to the involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex in context memory. Patients with large lesions to the frontal lobes, including the orbitofrontal cortex, exhibit various deficits in memory for contextual information, i.e., impairments of spatial memory [17] and deficits in tem- poral tagging [15]. It remains unclear at present, whether these deficits reflect the involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in memory for contextual information or result from global frontal executive deficits. We could be much more precise in that aspect as the participants of our experiments had brain damage limited only to the medial or- bitofrontal cortex (posterior part of the gyrus rectus) either in the left or right hemisphere. The aim of the present study was to test the involvement of the orbitofrontal portion of the VMPFC in memory for temporal and spatial order. Thirty-one subjects participated in the study: 21 patients who had undergone surgical repair of a ruptured aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery (ACoA) and 10 con- trol subjects. Patients were operated with ligation of the 0304-3940/$ – see front matter © 2004 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2004.03.084