Teasing apart tangrams: testing hippocampal pattern separation with a collaborative referencing paradigm.

The hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe cortex [medial temporal lobe cortices (MTLC)] both contribute to long-term memory. Although their contributions are thought to be dissociable, the nature of the representations that each region supports remains unclear. The Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) modeling approach suggests that hippocampus represents overlapping information in a sparser and therefore more separated fashion than MTLC.