Working memory for names and faces was investigated to ascertain whether verbal and nonspatial visual information is maintained in working memory by separate neural systems. The subjects performed a delayed match-to-sample task for famous or unfamous faces and names and a sensorimotor control task. Several occipital, temporal, parietal, and prefrontal areas were activated during all memory dela...

The fidelity of visual working memory was assessed for faces and non-face objects. In two experiments, four levels of memory load (1, 2, 3, or 4 items) were combined with four perceptual distances between probe and study items, with maximum item confusability occurring for the minimum memory load. Under these conditions, recognition memory for multiple faces exceeded that of a single face. This...

Patients with unilateral dorsolateral frontal lobe lesions and matched controls were given 2 tests of remote memory for public information, the Public Events Test and the Famous Faces Test. On both tests, the patients with frontal lobe lesions exhibited impaired recall for remote information. Recognition memory was relatively preserved. Provision of semantic and phonemic cues in the Famous Face...

Selective attention has been shown to bias sensory processing in favor of relevant stimuli and against irrelevant or distracting stimuli in perceptual tasks. Increasing evidence suggests that selective attention plays an important role during working memory maintenance, possibly by biasing sensory processing in favor of to-be-remembered items. In the current study, we investigated whether selec...

Alcoholic Korsakoffs, patients with right-hemisphere lesions, long-term alcoholics and normal control subjects were examined on three tests of facial memory and encoding. The Korsakoffs and patients with right-hemisphere lesions were impaired in their memory and simultaneous matching of unfamiliar faces. Their performance on a facial processing task indicated that they matched faces on the basi...

The hypothesis that working memory is crucial for reducing distraction by maintaining the prioritization of relevant information was tested in neuroimaging and psychological experiments with humans. Participants performed a selective attention task that required them to ignore distractor faces while holding in working memory a sequence of digits that were in the same order (low memory load) or ...