The memory-guided saccade paradigm is an ideal experimental model for studying spatial working memory. Both the posterior parietal cortex and frontal cortex are known to play a role in working memory; however, there is much debate about the degree of their involvement in the retention of information. We used event-related potentials and electromagnetic tomography to clarify the precise time cou...

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to determine if progesterone affects spatial and non-spatial working memory in intact male and female rats. METHODS Rats received subcutaneous injections of progesterone (500 microg) or vehicle (sesame oil). Four hours after hormone treatments, spatial and non-spatial memories were tested using novel object recognition and spatial object recognition task...

Working memory capacity increases throughout childhood and adolescence, which is important for the development of a wide range of cognitive abilities, including complex reasoning. The spatial-span task, in which subjects retain information about the order and position of a number of objects, is a sensitive task to measure development of spatial working memory. This review considers results from...

Human and nonhuman primate visual systems are divided into object and spatial information processing pathways. In the macaque, it has been shown that these pathways project to separate areas in the frontal lobe and that the ventral and dorsal frontal areas are, respectively, involved in working memory for objects and spatial locations. A positron emission tomography (PET) study was done to dete...

According to the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH), abnormalities of brain structures underlying procedural memory largely explain the language deficits in children with specific language impairment (SLI). These abnormalities are posited to result in core deficits of procedural memory, which in turn explain the grammar problems in the disorder. The abnormalities are also likely to lead to pro...

In mental rotation, a mental representation of an object must be rotated while the actual object remains visible. Where is this representation stored while it is being rotated? To answer this question, observers were asked to perform a mental rotation task during the delay interval of a visual working memory task. When the working memory task required the storage of object features, substantial...

Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) impairs working memory, but the exact nature of this deficit in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is not well understood. In this study patients with mild clinical symptoms of PD were compared with matched healthy control subjects on a computerized battery of tests designed to assess spatial working memory and verbal working memory. In the spatial ...

Visuospatial working memory and its involvement in arithmetic were examined in two groups of 7- to 11-year-olds: one comprising children described by teachers as displaying symptoms of nonverbal learning difficulties (N = 21), the other a control group without learning disabilities (N = 21). The two groups were matched for verbal abilities, age, gender, and sociocultural level. The children wer...