Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
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While previous functional neuroimaging studies have shown that semantic and episodic memory tasks activate different cortical regions, they never compared regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) patterns associated with semantic and episodic memory within the same experimental design. In this study, we used H2(15)O PET to study subjects in the course of semantic and episodic memory tasks. rCBF was measured in 9 normal volunteers during a resting baseline condition and two cognitive tasks. In the semantic categorisation task subjects heard a list of concrete words and had to respond to words belonging to the "animals" or "food" category. ⋯ Compared to the episodic memory tasks, the semantic memory tasks activated the superior temporal/insular cortex bilaterally and the right premotor cortex. Compared to the semantic memory tasks, the episodic memory tasks activated the right frontal cortex. These results suggest that cortical networks implicated in semantic and episodic memory show both common and unique regions, with the right prefrontal cortex being the neural correlate specific of episodic remembering.