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Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)

Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)

Published on: June 12, 2017

Visual working memory capacity and the medial temporal lobe.

Annette Jeneson¹, John T Wixted, Ramona O Hopkins

¹Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|March 9, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage retain normal visual working memory capacity. However, MTL damage impairs performance on visual tasks when working memory capacity is exceeded, especially at longer delays.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology

Background:

Medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage can cause memory impairments.
It remains unclear if these deficits stem from reduced visual working memory capacity or other factors.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether visual working memory capacity is impaired in patients with MTL damage.
To differentiate between working memory capacity limitations and other memory deficits.

Main Methods:

A change-detection task was used with patients exhibiting hippocampal or MTL lesions.
Participants viewed arrays of colored squares (1-6) with varying delay periods (3-8 seconds) before a recognition test.

Main Results:

Patients with MTL damage performed similarly to controls at a 1-second delay across all array sizes.
At longer delays, patients showed impairments only at large array sizes, suggesting capacity overload.

Conclusions:

Visual working memory capacity appears intact following MTL damage.
MTL damage primarily affects performance when task demands exceed visual working memory capacity.