Eichenbaum and colleagues observed that the same place did or did not activate the "goal-approach" cells in hippocampus depending on whether the place was the way for rats to approach specific goal. Parallel with this, the present neuroimage study revealed that, the same type of items could activate the hippocampus more when it was related to the task at hand than when it not. Participants were scanned by fMRI while they made judgments on the type of relationships contained in the word-pairs (e.g., Does the word pair, "furniture-table", contain a "category-exemplar" relationship?). Event-related analysis revealed that the forming of "task-related" association activated hippocampus more than that of "task-unrelated", even if it was the same type of items, and, this hippocampal difference was not caused by the different judgment requirements, nor by the effects of "yes" response. Consistently, the post-judgment cued-recall test exhibited a better retrieval performance for "task-related" associations than for the same type but "task-unrelated" associations. Results also showed that, the semantic re- latedness between the to-be-associated individual words (e.g., the related word pair "healthy-hospital" versus the unrelated word pair "price-way") was not enough to activate the hippocampus when it was "task-unrelated". Generally, we proposed that, through participating in forming of "task-related" asso- ciations and consolidating of episodic memory, hippocampus enabled the organism to keep the in- formation that owned great survival values in mind for future usage.
