Norms are provided for verbal and visuo-spatial immediate memory span, two tasks widely used in the clinical assessment of short-term memory and its neurological disorders. Data have been collected from 1355 male and female adult subjects, with various educational backgrounds and a 20-99 years age range. Span shows a major decrement after the late sixties and is affected by educational level. Male subjects score better on the spatial task. Data collected from 1112 male and female children, 4-to-10 year-old, show that span increases with age and boys score better on the spatial test.
Although cognitive impairment after cerebellar damage has been widely reported, the mechanisms of cerebro-cerebellar interactions are still a matter of debate. The cerebellum is involved in sequence detection and production in both motor and sensory domains, and sequencing has been proposed as the basic mechanism of cerebellar functioning. Furthermore, it has been suggested that knowledge of sequencing mechanisms may help to define cerebellar predictive control processes. In spite of its recognized importance, cerebellar sequencing has seldom been investigated in cognitive domains. Cognitive sequencing functions are often analysed by means of action/script elaboration. Lesion and activation studies have localized this function in frontal cortex and basal ganglia circuits. The present study is the first to report deficits in script sequencing after cerebellar damage. We employed a card-sequencing test, developed ad hoc, to evaluate the influence of the content to be sequenced. Stimuli consisted of sets of sentences that described actions with a precise logical and temporal sequence (Verbal Factor), sets of cartoon-like drawings that reproduced behavioural sequences (Behavioural Factor) or abstract figures (Spatial Factor). The influence of the lesion characteristics was analysed by grouping patients according to lesion-type (focal or atrophic) and lesion-side (right or left). The results indicated that patients with cerebellar damage present a cognitive sequencing impairment independently of lesion type or localization. A correlation was also shown between lesion side and characteristics of the material to be sequenced. Namely, patients with left lesions perform defectively only on script sequences based on pictorial material and patients with right lesions only on script sequences requiring verbal elaboration. The present data support the hypothesis that sequence processing is the cerebellar mode of operation also in the cognitive domain. In addition, the presence of right/left and pictorial/verbal differences is in agreement with the idea that cerebro-cerebellar interactions are organized in segregated cortico-cerebellar loops in which specificity is not related to the mode of functioning, but to the characteristics of the information processed.
Spatial span (Corsi's block-tapping test) and verbal span (Wechsler Digits Forward) were measured in 1354 normal subjects, aged from 20 to 99 yr., who were subdivided into seven age groups, into three groups according to education, and according to sex. Analysis of variance showed that the three main factors were significant for the spatial span test. The two spans examined held well up to the 60s, and only after this age did significant differences appear in the other age groups. On both tests there were significant differences between the groups divided according to education.
The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in RESEARCH IN
AbstractThe WISC-IV was used to compare the intellectual profile of two groups of children, one with specific learning disorders (SLDs), the other with intellectual disabilities (ID), with a view to identifying which of the four main factor indexes and two additional indexes can distinguish between the groups. We collected information on WISC-IV scores for 267 children (M age =10.61[SD=2.51], range 6-16 years, females = 99) with a diagnosis of either SLD or ID. Children with SLD performed better than those with ID in all measures. Only the SLD children, not the ID children, revealed significant differences in the four main factor indexes, and their scores for the additional General Ability Index (GAI) were higher than for the Cognitive Proficiency Index (CPI).Children with a diagnosis of SLD whose Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (FSIQ) was < 85 showed a similar pattern. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that children with SLD generally obtain high GAI scores, but have specific deficiencies relating to working memory and processing speed, whereas children with ID have a general intellectual impairment. These findings have important diagnostic and clinical implications and should be considered when making diagnostic decisions in borderline cognitive cases.
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