Cortical activity of good and poor spatial test performers during spatial and verbal processing studied with Slow Potential Topography.

Whether essential processing of spatial information is lateralized asymmetrically in the human cortex is still a matter of debate. In this study, items of an Item Response Theory calibrated test for spatial ability were used to ensure stimulus homogeneity and validity. Subjects were preselected as extreme groups of good and poor spatializers. Mapping of true DC-recorded slow potential shifts (SPSs) resulted in distinctly discriminable topographies with spatial and verbal-analytic material as well as with spatial performance groups within the spatial block. Left fronto-central negativity maxima in the verbal condition clearly contrasted with occipito-parietal peak activity in the spatial condition. Poor spatializers showed higher amplitudes as well as a tendency to asymmetric activity in right parietal (parieto-temporal) areas, whereas in good spatializers the activity was localized symmetrically in occipital and occipito-parietal regions. The findings emphasize the importance of the right posterior cortex for spatial processing (negativity maxima at occipital and right parietal sites) and suggest a task-specific lower cortical efficiency or, seen from a processing perspective, a higher Investment of Cortical Effort (ICE) on the part of poor spatializers.

[1]  E. B. Andersen,et al.  A goodness of fit test for the rasch model , 1973 .

[2]  W D Obrist,et al.  Sex and handedness differences in cerebral blood flow during rest and cognitive activity. , 1982, Science.

[3]  M. Annett.  A classification of hand preference by association analysis. , 1970, British journal of psychology.

[4]  S. H. Curry,et al.  Slow Potential Changes in the Human Brain , 1993, NATO ASI Series.

[5]  Andrew C. Papanicolaou,et al.  Visuospatial tasks compared via activation of regional cerebral blood flow , 1988, Neuropsychologia.

[6]  M. Farah,et al.  Mental rotation: An event-related potential study with a validated mental rotation task , 1989, Brain and Cognition.

[7]  A. Roitbak.  Cortical Slow Potentials, Depolarization of Glial Cells, and Extracellular Potassium Concentration , 1993 .

[8]  M. Corballis,et al.  Decisions about identity and orientation of rotated letters and digits , 1978, Memory & cognition.

[9]  John R. Anderson.  Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications , 1980 .

[10]  G. Pfurtscheller.  Handbook of electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology , 1978 .

[11]  M. Buchsbaum,et al.  Intelligence and changes in regional cerebral glucose metabolic rate following learning , 1992 .

[12]  M. Steiner,et al.  Cerebral correlates of imagining colours, faces and a map—II. Negative cortical DC potentials , 1990, Neuropsychologia.

[13]  C. Korunka,et al.  Possible Glial Contribution in the Electrogenesis of SPs , 1993 .

[14]  E. Speckmann,et al.  Slow Potential Changes in the Brain , 1993 .

[15]  M Allen.  Models of hemispheric specialization. , 1983, Psychological bulletin.

[16]  T. Elbert,et al.  EEG and slow cortical potentials in anticipation of mental tasks with different hemispheric involvement , 1981, Biological Psychology.

[17]  H Bauer,et al.  Technical requirements for high-quality scalp DC recordings. , 1989, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[18]  M. Annett.  Left, right, hand and brain : the right shift theory , 1985 .

[19]  J. Grafman,et al.  Distinctions and similarities among working memory processes: an event-related potential study. , 1992, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[20]  F. Perrin,et al.  Spherical splines for scalp potential and current density mapping. , 1989, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[21]  F. Rösler,et al.  Patterns of cerebral activation while mental images are rotated and changed in size. , 1995, Psychophysiology.

[22]  R. Shepard,et al.  Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects , 1971, Science.

[23]  I. W. Molenaar,et al.  Rasch models: foundations, recent developments and applications , 1995 .

[24]  R. Sternberg.  Death, taxes, and bad intelligence tests , 1991 .

[25]  F Rösler,et al.  Topographic differences of slow event-related brain potentials in blind and sighted adult human subjects during haptic mental rotation. , 1993, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[26]  Mark S. Cohen,et al.  Changes in cortical activity during mental rotation. A mapping study using functional MRI. , 1996, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[27]  B. J. Casey,et al.  Regional brain activity when selecting a response despite interference: An H2 15O PET study of the stroop and an emotional stroop , 1994, Human brain mapping.

[28]  Terence W. Picton,et al.  Human event-related potentials , 1988 .

[29]  Gert Pfurtscheller,et al.  Intelligence and Spatiotemporal Patterns of Event-Related Desynchronization (ERD). , 1995 .

[30]  Georg Rasch,et al.  Probabilistic Models for Some Intelligence and Attainment Tests , 1981, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[31]  M Leodolter,et al.  Rare events and the CNV--the oddball CNV. , 1992, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[32]  I. Whishaw,et al.  Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology , 1995 .

[33]  Leslie G. Ungerleider,et al.  Object vision and spatial vision: two cortical pathways , 1983, Trends in Neurosciences.

[34]  L. Thurstone.  Primary mental abilities. , 1938, Science.

[35]  Georg Deutsch,et al.  Left brain, right brain, 3rd ed. , 1989 .

[36]  S. P. Springer,et al.  Left brain, right brain , 1981 .

[37]  B Milner,et al.  THE ROLE OF EARLY LEFT‐BRAIN INJURY IN DETERMINING LATERALIZATION OF CEREBRAL SPEECH FUNCTIONS , 1977, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[38]  W Ritter,et al.  Event-related brain potential evidence for a verbal working memory deficit in multiple sclerosis. , 1994, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[39]  M. Heil,et al.  Distinct Cortical Activation Patterns during Long-Term Memory Retrieval of Verbal, Spatial, and Color Information , 1995, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[40]  Gerald E. Larson,et al.  Evaluation of a “mental effort” hypothesis for correlations between cortical metabolism and intelligence , 1995 .

[41]  C. C. Wood,et al.  Scalp distributions of event-related potentials: an ambiguity associated with analysis of variance models. , 1985, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[42]  J. Jonides,et al.  Dissociating verbal and spatial working memory using PET. , 1996, Cerebral cortex.

[43]  H. Bauer,et al.  Operant conditioning of brain steady potential shifts in man , 1979, Biofeedback and self-regulation.

[44]  M. Buchsbaum,et al.  Cortical glucose metabolic rate correlates of abstract reasoning and attention studied with positron emission tomography , 1988 .

[45]  J. Thayer,et al.  The continuing problem of false positives in repeated measures ANOVA in psychophysiology: a multivariate solution. , 1987, Psychophysiology.