Activation of the left hippocampal formation predicts how well a novel vocabulary is learned: an event-related fMRI study

The hippocampal formation plays a crucial role in the initial learning of new associations in a variety of domains. Based on the observation that children learn their first words by associative learning, i.e. by associating objects with verbal sounds frequently occurring in the presence of these objects, we here examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging if the hippocampal formation contributes to the initial phase of learning new word meanings. Fourteen adults took each part in two experimental conditions within the MRI scanner. In one condition, subjects learned an artificial vocabulary of 45 concrete…