What's "up"? Impaired Spatial Preposition Processing in Posterior Cortical Atrophy.
Authors
Shebani, Zubaida
Nestor, Peter J
Pulvermüller, Friedemann
Publication Date
2021Journal Title
Front Hum Neurosci
ISSN
1662-5161
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Volume
15
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
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Shebani, Z., Nestor, P. J., & Pulvermüller, F. (2021). What's "up"? Impaired Spatial Preposition Processing in Posterior Cortical Atrophy.. Front Hum Neurosci, 15 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.731104
Abstract
This study seeks to confirm whether lesions in posterior regions of the brain involved in visuo-spatial processing are of functional relevance to the processing of words with spatial meaning. We investigated whether patients with Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), an atypical form of Alzheimer's Disease which predominantly affects parieto-occipital brain regions, is associated with deficits in working memory for spatial prepositions. Case series of patients with PCA and matched healthy controls performed tests of immediate and delayed serial recall on words from three lexico-semantic word categories: number words (twelve), spatial prepositions (behind) and function words (e.g., shall). The three word categories were closely matched for a number of psycholinguistic and semantic variables including length, bi-/tri-gram frequency, word frequency, valence and arousal. Relative to controls, memory performance of PCA patients on short word lists was significantly impaired on spatial prepositions in the delayed serial recall task. These results suggest that lesions in posterior parieto-occipital regions specifically impair the processing of spatial prepositions. Our findings point to a pertinent role of posterior cortical regions in the semantic processing of words with spatial meaning and provide strong support for modality-specific semantic theories that recognize the necessary contributions of sensorimotor regions to conceptual semantic processing.
Keywords
Human Neuroscience, posterior cortical atrophy, PCA, working memory, semantic processing, embodiment cognition, spatial prepositions, spatial language processing, category specific impairments
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.731104
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/331980
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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