Verbal and Non-Verbal Short-Term Memory Impairment Following Hemispheric Damage

Short-term memory was investigated in 30 control and 125 unilaterally brain-damaged patients with a series of tests requiring the immediate reproduction of strings of items of increasing length. In three tests the items were auditorially presented digits or words: one test asked for oral repetition of digits, while the other two required the patient to point to written digits or to pictures. The fourth test aimed at measuring spatial span. On both the Digits Forward test and the two other verbal tests not requiring the use of speech, left brain-damaged patients were impaired in comparison to normals, while the right brain-damaged patients were not. Aphasics had a significantly shorter verbal span than non-aphasic patients with left hemisphere damage. Spatial span, on the other hand, was significantly affected by a lesion posteriorly located in either hemisphere, but not by aphasia. Two patients with an exceedingly poor verbal memory span were observed, one suffering from anomic aphasia and the other from conduction aphasia. There were also two right hemisphere damaged patients who showed an extreme reduction of spatial span, which could not be accounted for by space perceptual disorders and contrasted with a normal performance on a spatial long-term memory test.

[1]  E K Warrington,et al.  The anatomical localisation of selective impairment of auditory verbal short-term memory. , 1971, Neuropsychologia.

[2]  D. Hebb.  Distinctive features of learning in the higher animal , 1961 .

[3]  M. Denckla,et al.  Relation of forward and backward digit repetition to neurological impairment in children with learning disabilities. , 1974, Neuropsychologia.

[4]  Brenda Milner,et al.  Visually-guided maze learning in man: effects of bilateral hippocampal, bilateral frontal, and unilateral cerebral lesions , 1965 .

[5]  E. Renzi,et al.  The token test: A sensitive test to detect receptive disturbances in aphasics. , 1962, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[6]  A. Luria,et al.  Towards a neurodynamic analysis of memory disturbances with lesions of the left temporal lobe , 1967 .

[7]  H. Gardner,et al.  The repetition defect in conduction aphasia: Mnestic or linguistic? , 1974 .

[8]  E K Warrington,et al.  Amnesia and memory for visual location. , 1974, Neuropsychologia.

[9]  D. Drachman,et al.  Memory and the hippocampal complex. II. Is memory a multiple process , 1966 .

[10]  R. Angelergues,et al.  Étude neurolinguistique de l'aphasie de conduction , 1964 .

[11]  T Shallice,et al.  The selective impairment of auditory verbal short-term memory. , 1969, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[12]  H Goodglass,et al.  Some dimensions of auditory language comprehension in aphasia. , 1970, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[13]  L. Costa.  The Relation of Visuospatial Dysfunction to Digit Span Performance in Patients with Cerebral Lesions , 1975, Cortex.

[14]  Murray Dj,et al.  The nature of the memory deficit in Korsakoff's psychosis. , 1973 .

[15]  D. M. Sterne.  The Benton, Porteus and WAIS digit span tests with normal and brain-injured subjects. , 1969, Journal of clinical psychology.

[16]  R. Elston,et al.  The Hypotheses That Can be Tested When There are Interactions in an Analysis of Variance Model , 1964 .

[17]  B. Milner,et al.  Interhemispheric differences in the localization of psychological processes in man. , 1971, British medical bulletin.

[18]  E. Renzi,et al.  Oral Apraxia and Aphasia , 1966 .

[19]  E. Warrington,et al.  An analysis of short-term and long-term memory defects in man. , 1973 .

[20]  N. Geschwind.  Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man. II. , 1965, Brain : a journal of neurology.