The effect of stimulus features on working memory of categorical and coordinate spatial relations in patients with unilateral brain damage

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• 作者：Ineke J.M. van der Ham^a ; ^{c.j.m.vanderham@uu.nl} ; Richard J.A. van Wezel^b ; ^c ; ^d ; Anna Oleksiak^b ; ^c ; Martine J.E. van Zandvoort^a ; ^e ; Catharina J.M. Frijns^e ; L. Jaap Kappelle^e ; Albert Postma^a ; ^e
• 关键词：Categorical and coordinate spatial relations ; Working memory ; Lateralization ; Unilateral brain damage ; Stimulus features
• 刊名：Cortex
• 出版年：2012
• 期刊代码：P127_00109452
• 类别：neu
• 出版时间：June, 2012
• 卷：48
• 期：6
• 页码：737-745
• 文件大小：402 K

摘要

Spatial relations are typically divided into categorical and coordinate spatial relations. Categorical relations are abstract and show a left hemisphere (LH) advantage, whereas coordinate relations are metric and related to a right hemisphere (RH) advantage. In the current study a working memory task was used to asses categorical and coordinate performance with two different stimulus sets. In this task, participants had to compare two sequentially presented stimuli, consisting of a dot and a cross. The cross size used in the stimuli was either large or small; a direct manipulation of the amount of information provided to determine a category, or to assess a distance. Patients with damage in the LH or the RH and highly comparable controls were tested. In control participants, categorical processing is faster with the use of a large cross, i.e., more visual information about category boundaries. In contrast, coordinate performance was more accurate with a small cross, i.e., presenting less unnecessary visual information. LH patients showed a specific defect in processing categorical stimuli with a small cross and coordinate stimuli with a large cross. The RH patients were impaired in all conditions except for the categorical small cross condition. We conclude that a larger amount of information present in stimuli increases categorical processing performance and decreases coordinate processing performance, while opposite effects are found for less stimulus information.