Federmeier Kara D, Benjamin Aaron S
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2005 Dec;12(6):993-8. doi: 10.3758/bf03206434.
Hemispheric specialization has been studied extensively within subfields ranging from perception to language comprehension. However, the study of asymmetries for basic memory functions--an area that holds promise for bridging these low- and high-level cognitive domains--has been sporadic at best. We examined each hemisphere's tendency to retain verbal information over time, using a continuous recognition memory task with lateralized study items and central test probes. We found that the ubiquitous advantage of the left hemisphere for the processing and retention of verbal information is attenuated and perhaps even reversed over long retention intervals. This result is consistent with theories that propose differences in the degree to which the hemispheres maintain veridical versus semantically transformed representations of the input they receive.
半球特化已经在从感知到语言理解等多个子领域中得到了广泛研究。然而，对于基本记忆功能的不对称性研究——这一领域有望弥合这些低级和高级认知领域之间的差距——充其量也只是零星的。我们使用带有侧向呈现学习项目和中央测试探针的连续识别记忆任务，研究了每个半球随时间保留言语信息的倾向。我们发现，左半球在处理和保留言语信息方面普遍存在的优势在较长的保留间隔内会减弱，甚至可能逆转。这一结果与一些理论一致，这些理论提出，两个半球在维持它们所接收输入的真实表征与语义转换表征的程度上存在差异。
