The hippocampus plays an essential role in long-term episodic memory by supporting the recollection of contextual details, whereas surrounding regions such as the perirhinal cortex support familiarity-based recognition discriminations. Working memory - the ability to maintain information over very brief periods of time - is traditionally thought to rely heavily on frontoparietal attention networks, but recent work has shown that it can also rely on the hippocampus. However, the conditions in which the hippocampus becomes involved in working memory tasks are unclear and whether it contributes to recollection or familiarity-based responses in working memory is only beginning to be explored. In the current paper, we first review and contrast the existing amnesia literature examining recollection and familiarity in episodic and working memory. The results indicate that recollection and familiarity contribute to both episodic and working memory. However, in contrast to episodic memory, in working memory the hippocampus is particularly critical for familiarity-based rather than recollection-based discrimination. Moreover, the results indicate that the role of the hippocampus in working memory can be obscured due to ‘criterion-induced process-masking’ because it primarily supports intermediate-confidence recognition decisions. We then report results from a new working memory study examining the ability of amnesics to detect global and local changes in novel complex objects (i.e., fribbles), which indicates that the hippocampus plays an especially critical role in working memory when the task requires the detection of global rather than discrete changes. We conclude by considering the results in light of neurocomputational models and proposing a general framework for understanding the relationship between episodic and working memory.

海马体通过支持上下文细节的回忆在长期情景记忆中发挥着重要作用，而周围区域（例如鼻周皮层）则支持基于熟悉度的识别辨别。工作记忆——在很短的时间内保存信息的能力——传统上被认为严重依赖于额顶注意力网络，但最近的研究表明它也可以依赖于海马体。然而，海马体参与工作记忆任务的条件尚不清楚，并且它是否有助于工作记忆中的回忆或基于熟悉的反应才刚刚开始探索。在本文中，我们首先回顾并对比了现有的健忘症文献，研究了情景记忆和工作记忆的回忆和熟悉程度。结果表明，回忆和熟悉度有助于情景记忆和工作记忆。然而，与情景记忆相反，在工作记忆中，海马体对于基于熟悉度而不是基于回忆的辨别尤其重要。此外，结果表明，海马体在工作记忆中的作用可能会因“标准诱导的过程掩蔽”而被掩盖，因为它主要支持中间置信度识别决策。然后，我们报告了一项新的工作记忆研究的结果，该研究检查了健忘症患者检测新奇复杂物体（即小玩意）的全局和局部变化的能力，这表明当任务需要检测时，海马体在工作记忆中发挥着特别关键的作用是全局性的而不是离散性的变化。最后，我们根据神经计算模型考虑结果，并提出一个理解情景记忆和工作记忆之间关系的通用框架。