Abstract
Working memory (WM) refers to the system that comprises of the central executive and two subsidiaries or ‘slave systems ’, one of which is the phonological store for maintaining verbal information, another of which is the visuospatial sketchpad for visual and spatial information. The central executive is considered to play important roles such as supervising, integrating and processing information stored in the slave systems during the cognitive activities. The current WM model also assumes the episodic buffer which is responsible for binding information from different kinds of sources in the long-term memory (Baddeley, 2000). A functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI study (Prabhakaran et al.,2000) suggested that right frontal areas play an important role in integrating different forms (e. g., verbal and spatial) of information.
This study investigated how the normal subjects and a patient with a right frontal lesion performed on tasks regarding the maintenance of integrated information derived from two different domains. The nature and mechanisms of memory binding were discussed.
