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Abstract:
Spatial memory is one of the most important cognitive
functions in daily life, enabling us to locate objects in our
environment or to learn a route or a path. In the present study, we
elaborated on the notion that human spatial memory entails multiple
sub-processes, relying on different brain structures. Therefore, 50
patients with an ischemic stroke and 40 healthy participants
performed various spatial memory tasks: spatial span, maze learning
and object location memory. Furthermore, three different aspects of
object location memory were assessed: (1) object-location binding,
(2) positional memory, and (3) a combination of these two aspects.
Patients were impaired on the maze learning task but not on the
Corsi block span. Most interestingly, there was a clear
dissociation between the different aspects of object-location
memory. The left hemisphere group was impaired on object-location
binding, whereas the right hemisphere group performed poorly on
positional memory. The lateralization of these spatial memory
functions might relate to the differential role of the hemispheres
in the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations
(Kosslyn, 1994). In short, the findings support the notion that
spatial memory can be fractionated in a number of functionally
independent processing components, which in turn engage their own
specific neural substrate.
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