The neural bases of the short-term storage of verbal information are anatomically variable across individuals

Feredoes, E., Tononi, G. and Postle, B. R. (2007) The neural bases of the short-term storage of verbal information are anatomically variable across individuals. The Journal of Neuroscience, 27 (41). pp. 11003-11008. ISSN 1529-2401 doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1573-07.2007

Abstract/Summary

What are the precise brain regions supporting the short-term retention of verbal information? A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study suggested that they may be topographically variable across individuals, occurring, in most, in regions posterior to prefrontal cortex (PFC), and that detection of these regions may be best suited to a single-subject (SS) approach to fMRI analysis (Feredoes and Postle, 2007). In contrast, other studies using spatially normalized group-averaged (SNGA) analyses have localized storage-related activity to PFC. To evaluate the necessity of the regions identified by these two methods, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to SS- and SNGA-identified regions throughout the retention period of a delayed letter-recognition task. Results indicated that rTMS targeting SS analysis-identified regions of left perisylvian and sensorimotor cortex impaired performance, whereas rTMS targeting the SNGA-identified region of left caudal PFC had no effect on performance. Our results support the view that the short-term retention of verbal information can be supported by regions associated with acoustic, lexical, phonological, and speech-based representation of information. They also suggest that the brain bases of some cognitive functions may be better detected by SS than by SNGA approaches to fMRI data analysis.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/32408
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Publisher	The Society for Neuroscience
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item