Hemispatial neglect and serial order in verbal working memory

Abstract

Working memory refers to our ability to actively maintain and process a limited amount of information during a brief period of time. Often, not only the information itself but also its serial order is crucial for good task performance. It was recently proposed that serial order is grounded in spatial cognition. Here, we compared performance of a group of right hemisphere-damaged patients with hemispatial neglect to healthy controls in verbal working memory tasks. Participants memorized sequences of consonants at span level and had to judge whether a target consonant belonged to the memorized sequence (item task) or whether a pair of consonants were presented in the same order as in the memorized sequence (order task). In line with this idea that serial order is grounded in spatial cognition, we found that neglect patients made significantly more errors in the order task than in the item task compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, this deficit seemed functionally related to neglect severity and was more frequently observed following right posterior brain damage. Interestingly, this specific impairment for serial order in verbal working memory was not lateralized. We advance the hypotheses of a potential contribution to the deficit of serial order in neglect patients of either or both (1) reduced spatial working memory capacity that enables to keep track of the spatial codes that provide memorized items with a positional context, (2) a spatial compression of these codes in the intact representational space.

A momentum effect in temporal arithmetic

“…The hypothesis that the momentum effect in temporal arithmetic reflects a genuinely intrinsic spatial component is consistent with previous results showing that temporal duration processing can be affected by a variety of visuospatial manipulations, including prismatic adaptation (Frassinetti et al, 2009), reverse reading (Casasanto &Bottini, 2014), andvisuospatial priming (Di Bono et al, 2012). Furthermore, neuropsychological studies on patients affected by contralesional space disorders reveal a systematic association between pathological visuospatial processing and conceptual time in the form of ordered events processing (Antoine et al, 2019;Bonato et al, 2016, see Rinaldi et al, 2018 on the impact of purely visual impairment). Both lines of evidence (normal and pathological) therefore converge in suggesting that some aspects of time representation (either sensory or conceptual) are spatial in nature.…”

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over the Right Inferior Parietal Cortex Reduces Transposition Errors in a Syllabic Reordering Task

“…Previously, the right intraparietal sulcus was suggested as a neural correlate with the ability to represent the serial order of linguistic elements [41,42]. Lesion studies seem to confirm the involvement of the right parietal cortex in a verbal working memory task, in which the serial order of memorized consonants had to be recognized [43].…”

“…The neural substrate of this distinction has been identified at the level of the left and right intraparietal sulcus [41,42]. Recently, Antoine and colleagues [43] reported that patients affected by hemispatial neglect with lesions to the right parietal posterior cortex produced more order errors than item errors in a verbal working memory task, compared to healthy controls.…”

Reward Expectation Differentially Modulates Global and Local Spatial Working Memory Accuracy

“…Sequential information is organized in either time or space, which are compatible (Fischer-Baum and Benjamin, 2014). Serial-order memory is highly connected with spatial working memory, and sequence information is represented in the form of space (van Dijck et al, 2013;Antoine et al, 2018).…”