The hemispheric side of neocortical damage does not affect memory for unidimensional position. An experiment wih...

The role of neocortical areas in visuo-spatial memory was investigated by testing unilateral hemisphere-damaged patients for their ability to reproduce the position of a dot on a horizontal line after a delay. One hundred and eleven patients, divided into 4 groups on the basis of the side of damage and of the presence or absence of visual field defects, and 56 controls were tested. There were 2 sets of experimental conditions: (i) a free delay condition of 0, 20 or 180 sec., and (ii) a 20 sec. delay condition filled with 2 kinds of interpolated perceptual activity. Forgetting was significantly affected by presence of hemisphere damage, but not by the side and the intrahemispheric locus of lesion. It was concluded that the memory ability involved by this task is not related to the functioning of a specific cortical area.