Deficits in Short-Term Auditory Memory for Verbal Material Following Right Temporal Removals in Humans

Abstract

Right, as well as left, temporal patients were significantly impaired on short-term auditory memory for consonant trigrams. The severity of the deficit shown by both groups was not related to the association value (low, medium, high) of the trigrams or the duration of the intertrial intervals (from 6 sec to 1 min) used in this study. Right temporal patients were also deficient on tests of tonal memory and delayed facial recognition. The results are discussed in terms of a sequential model of information processing involving modality-specific short-term memory and material-specific long-term retention.