Posterior hippocampal CA2/3 volume is associated with autobiographical memory recall ability in lower performing individuals

Abstract

People vary substantially in their capacity to recall past experiences, known as autobiographical memories. Here we investigated whether the volumes of specific hippocampal subfields were associated with autobiographical memory retrieval ability. We manually segmented the full length of the two hippocampi in 201 healthy young adults into DG/CA4, CA2/3, CA1, subiculum, pre/parasubiculum and uncus, in the largest such manually segmented subfield sample yet reported. Across the group we found no evidence for an association between any subfield volume and autobiographical memory recall ability. However, when participants were assigned to lower and higher performing groups based on their memory recall scores, we found that bilateral CA2/3 volume was significantly and positively associated with autobiographical memory recall performance specifically in the lower performing group. We further observed that this effect was attributable to posterior CA2/3. By contrast, semantic details from autobiographical memories, and performance on a range of laboratory-based memory tests, did not correlate with CA2/3 volume. Overall, our findings highlight that posterior CA2/3 may be particularly pertinent for autobiographical memory recall. They also reveal that there may not be direct one-to-one mapping of posterior CA2/3 volume with autobiographical memory ability, with size mattering perhaps only in those with poorer memory recall.