Sensory-motor integration and brain lesions: Progress toward explaining domain-specific phenomena within domain-general working memory.

Reports of rare patients who seem to lack the ability to retain certain types of information across brief delays have long sustained the popular idea that newly-perceived verbal, visual, and spatial information is initially recorded in separate, specialized short-term memory buffers. However, evidence from these same cases includes puzzling details that question explanations based on isolated deficits to a specialized storage system. We highlight consistent findings from patients with deficient auditory short-term memory that warrant further investigation and may challenge the specialized store account, including that short-term recognition memory performance appears to be much stronger than recall, and not so obviously impaired. We also describe the substantial problems for the broader memory system caused by assuming that the patients' deficits are focused in a specialized module. We suggest that a sensory-motor integration account of the patient cases may adequately explain these patterns, and therefore presents a path toward incorporating into the embedded processes framework greater clarity about how domain-specific phenomena in immediate memory tasks arise. We further contend that applying ideas about sensory-motor recruitment could improve working memory theory.

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