Modality Specific Cerebro-Cerebellar Activations in Verbal Working Memory: An fMRI Study

Abstract

Verbal working memory (VWM) engages frontal and temporal/parietal circuits subserving the phonological loop, as well as, superior and inferior cerebellar regions which have projections from these neocortical areas. Different cerebro-cerebellar circuits may be engaged for integrating aurally- and visually-presented information for VWM. The present fMRI study investigated load (2, 4, or 6 letters) and modality (auditory and visual) dependent cerebro-cerebellar VWM activation using a Sternberg task. FMRI revealed modality-independent activations in left frontal (BA 6/9/44), insular, cingulate (BA 32), and bilateral inferior parietal/supramarginal (BA 40) regions, as well as in bilateral superior (HVI) and right inferior (HVIII) cerebellar regions. Visual presentation evoked prominent activations in right superior (HVI/CrusI) cerebellum, bilateral occipital (BA19) and left parietal (BA7/40) cortex while auditory presentation showed robust activations predominately in bilateral temporal regions (BA21/22). In the cerebellum, we noted a visual to auditory emphasis of function progressing from superior to inferior and from lateral to medial regions. These results extend our previous findings of fMRI activation in cerebro-cerebellar networks during VWM, and demonstrate both modality dependent commonalities and differences in activations with increasing memory load.

Impacts of Normal Aging on Different Working Memory Tasks: Implications from an fMRI Study

“…Comparing aurally and visually presented information for verbal working memory, Kirschen and colleagues came up with the same results. That study showed that visual presentation evoked prominent activations in bilateral occipital (BA19) and left parietal (BA7/40) corteices [17]. These results are also consistent with our next contrast, verbal-auditory, that showed lingual gyrus and intracalcarine cortex activations.…”

“…All maps are thresholded at a whole-brain corrected P < 0.05 using cluster-wise P < 0.05. For details see Table 3. bilateral inferior parietal/supramarginal regions were shown to be active [17]. These similarities suggest that language processing and maintenance for Persian is identical to English rather than Arabic.…”

Components of the Language-Ready Brain

“…Tellingly, when the auditory memory is overloaded (hence alpha rhythm enhancement is further employed), acoustic degradation affects processing, because of the noncanonical ellipsis of alpha suppression . This is also consistent with studies reporting an increased activation of the cerebellum in high-load tasks, suggesting a prominent role of the cerebellum in working memory processing (Kirschen et al, 2010;Stoodley et al, 2012;Luis et al, 2015).…”

Functional Topography of the Human Cerebellum Revealed by Functional Neuroimaging Studies

“…Further, the cerebellum is involved not only in maintenance during working memory tasks, but also in the encoding and retrieval phases (see below). Visual and verbal nback tasks engage similar cerebellar regions, suggesting that the role of the cerebellum during the n-back task is independent of modality (Hautzel et al 2009), although differences have been shown for visual and auditory working memory using a Sternberg paradigm (Kirschen et al 2010). Cerebellar activation has also been shown to increase as a function of increasing memory load (e.g., Beneventi et al 2007;Salmi et al 2010).…”