Olton, David (1943-1994)
David Olton was a psychologist who studied the neuroscience of memory and animal cognition. He discovered that rats not only learned and remembered places, but like humans, could keep lists of places in memory for hours. His work on memory in animals, aimed toward modeling human memory and amnesia, led to the discovery that remembering places required the same brain structures in rats and humans: the hippocampal system. These basic discoveries launched a research program into how the hippocampal system normally supported memory, how it was impaired by physical damage, aging, or by diseases such as Alzheimer's dementia, and how impaired memory might be restored.
David Olton was born in New Jersey and reared in Richmond, Virginia. He attended Haverford College, where he enjoyed the questions posed in philosophy classes, but he was more impressed with the surer methods of the natural sciences. After taking a course in psychophysics, he decided that the combination of psychological questions and empirical methods was the right fit. He earned a B.A. in psychology in 1964 and was awarded the Pennsylvania Psychological Association prize for the best undergraduate research project.
Olton's interest in behavioral neuroscience grew with his dissertation work at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Robert L.
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