Route learning in Korsakoff's syndrome: Residual acquisition of spatial memory despite profound amnesia

Korsakoff's syndrome (KS) is characterized by explicit amnesia, but relatively spared implicit memory. The aim of this study was to assess to what extent KS patients can acquire spatial information while performing a spatial navigation task. Furthermore, we examined whether residual spatial acquisition in KS was based on automatic or effortful coding processes. Therefore, 20 KS patients and 20 matched healthy controls performed six tasks on spatial navigation after they navigated through a residential area. Ten participants per group were instructed to pay close attention (intentional condition), while 10 received mock instructions (incidental condition). KS patients showed hampered performance on a majority of tasks, yet their performance was superior to chance level on a route time and distance estimation tasks, a map drawing task and a route walking task. Performance was relatively spared on the route distance estimation task, but there were large variations between participants. Acquisition in KS was automatic rather than effortful, since no significant differences were obtained between the intentional and incidental condition on any task, whereas for the healthy controls, the intention to learn was beneficial for the map drawing task and the route walking task. The results of this study suggest that KS patients are still able to acquire spatial information during navigation on multiple domains despite the presence of the explicit amnesia. Residual acquisition is most likely based on automatic coding processes.     

Attentional effects on orientation judgements are dependent on memory consolidation processes

Are the effects of memory and attention on perception synergistic, antagonistic, or independent? Tested separately, memory and attention have been shown to affect the accuracy of orientation judgements. When multiple stimuli are presented sequentially versus simultaneously, error variance is reduced. When a target is validly cued, precision is increased. What if they are manipulated together? We combined memory and attention manipulations in an orientation judgement task to answer this question. Two circular gratings were presented sequentially or simultaneously. On some trials a brief luminance cue preceded the stimuli. Participants were cued to report the orientation of one of the two gratings by rotating a response grating. We replicated the finding that error variance is reduced on sequential trials. Critically, we found interacting effects of memory and attention. Valid cueing reduced the median, absolute error only when two stimuli appeared together and improved it to the level of performance on uncued sequential trials, whereas invalid cueing always increased error. This effect was not mediated by cue predictiveness; however, predictive cues reduced the standard deviation of the error distribution, whereas nonpredictive cues reduced “guessing”. Our results suggest that, when the demand on memory is greater than a single stimulus, attention is a bottom-up process that prioritizes stimuli for consolidation. Thus attention and memory are synergistic.     

How are bodies special? Effects of body features on spatial reasoning

Embodied views of cognition argue that cognitive processes are influenced by bodily experience. This implies that when people make spatial judgments about human bodies, they bring to bear embodied knowledge that affects spatial reasoning performance. Here, we examined the specific contribution to spatial reasoning of visual features associated with the human body. We used two different tasks to elicit distinct visuospatial transformations: object-based transformations, as elicited in typical mental rotation tasks, and perspective transformations, used in tasks in which people deliberately adopt the egocentric perspective of another person. Body features facilitated performance in both tasks. This result suggests that observers are particularly sensitive to the presence of a human head and body, and that these features allow observers to quickly recognize and encode the spatial configuration of a figure. Contrary to prior reports, this facilitation was not related to the transformation component of task performance. These results suggest that body features facilitate task components other than spatial transformation, including the encoding of stimulus orientation.     

Integration of spatial information across vision and language

Three experiments investigated whether spatial information acquired from vision and language is maintained in distinct spatial representations on the basis of the input modality. Participants studied a visual and a verbal layout of objects at different times from either the same (Experiments 1 and 2) or different learning perspectives (Experiment 3) and then carried out a series of pointing judgments involving objects from the same or different layouts. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that participants pointed equally fast on within- and between-layout trials; coupled with verbal reports from participants, this result suggests that they integrated all locations in a single spatial representation during encoding. However, when learning took place from different perspectives in Experiment 3, participants were faster to respond to within- than between-layout trials and indicated that they kept separate representations during learning. Results are compared to those from similar studies that involved layouts learned from perception only.     

The joint flanker effect and the joint Simon effect: On the comparability of processes underlying joint compatibility effects

Previous studies observed compatibility effects in different interference paradigms such as the Simon and flanker task even when the task was distributed across two co-actors. In both Simon and flanker tasks, performance is improved in compatible trials relative to incompatible trials if one actor works on the task alone as well as if two co-actors share the task. These findings have been taken to indicate that actors automatically co-represent their co-actor’s task. However, recent research on the joint Simon and joint flanker effect suggests alternative non-social interpretations. To which degree both joint effects are driven by the same underlying processes is the question of the present study, and it was scrutinized by manipulating the visibility of the co-actor. While the joint Simon effect was not affected by the visibility of the co-actor, the joint flanker effect was reduced when participants did not see their co-actors but knew where the co-actors were seated. These findings provide further evidence for a spatial interpretation of the joint Simon effect. In contrast to recent claims, however, we propose a new explanation of the joint flanker effect that attributes the effect to an impairment in the focusing of spatial attention contingent on the visibility of the co-actor.     

Introducing a new age-and-cognition-sensitive measurement for assessing spatial orientation using a landmark-less virtual reality navigational task

Age-related impairments during spatial navigation have been widely reported in egocentric and allocentric paradigms. However, the effect of age on more specific navigational components such as the ability to drive or update directional information has not received enough attention. In this study we investigated the effect of age on spatial updating of a visual target after a series of whole–body rotations and transitions using a novel landmark-less virtual reality (VR) environment. Moreover, a significant number of previous studies focused on measures susceptible to a general decline in motor skills such as the spent time navigating, the distance traversed. The current paper proposes a new compound spatial measure to assess navigational performance, examines its reliability and compares its power with those of the measures of duration and traversed distance in predicting participants' age and cognitive groups assessed by Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores. Using data from 319 adults (20–83 years), our results confirm the reliability, the age sensitivity, and the cognitive validity of the designed spatial measure as well as its superiority to the measures of duration and traversed distance in predicting age and MoCA score. In addition, the results show the significant effect of age cognitive status on spatial updating.     

Motor expertise and performance in spatial tasks: A meta-analysis

The present study aimed to provide a summary of findings relevant to the influence of motor expertise on performance in spatial tasks and to examine potential moderators of this effect. Studies of relevance were those in which individuals involved in activities presumed to require motor expertise were compared to non-experts in such activities. A final set of 62 effect sizes from 33 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed an overall advantage in favor of motor experts in spatial tasks (d = 0.38). However, the magnitude of that effect was moderated by expert type (athlete, open skills/ball sports, runner/cyclist, gymnast/dancers, musicians), stimulus type (2D, blocks, bodies, others), test category (mental rotation, spatial perception, spatial visualization), specific test (Mental Rotations Test, generic mental rotation, disembedding, rod-and-frame test, other), and publication status. These findings are discussed in the context of embodied cognition and the potential role of activities requiring motor expertise in promoting good spatial performance.     

Transitivity,Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left‐to‐right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.     

Dealing with Big Numbers: Representation and Understanding of Magnitudes Outside of Human Experience

Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the effectiveness of hierarchical alignment in improving estimations, and transfer across dimensions. The activity was successful in increasing accuracy for temporal and spatial magnitudes, and learning transferred to the estimation of numeric magnitudes associated with events and objects. However, there were also a number of informative differences in performance on temporal, spatial, and numeric magnitude measures, suggesting that participants possess different categorical information for these scales. Educational implications are discussed.     

The extent of working memory deficits associated with Williams syndrome: exploration of verbal and spatial domains and executively controlled processes

The present study investigated verbal and spatial working memory (WM) functioning in individuals with the neuro-developmental disorder Williams syndrome (WS) using WM component tasks. While there is strong evidence of WM impairments in WS, previous research has focused on short-term memory and has neglected assessment of executive components of WM. There is a particular lack of consensus concerning the profile of verbal WM functioning in WS. Here, WS participants were compared to typically developing participants matched for (1) verbal ability and (2) spatial ability (N = 14 in each of the 3 groups). Individuals with WS were impaired on verbal WM tasks, both those involving short-term maintenance of information and executive manipulation, in comparison to verbal-matched controls. Surprisingly, individuals with WS were not impaired on a spatial task assessing short-term maintenance of information in memory (remembering spatial locations) compared to spatial-matched controls. They were, however, impaired on a spatial executive WM task requiring the manipulation of spatial information in memory. The present study suggests that individuals with WS show WM impairments that extend to both verbal and spatial domains, although spatial deficits are selective to executive aspects of WM function.