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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 10, 2007, 27(41):11003-11008; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1573-07.2007

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Brief Communications
The Neural Bases of the Short-Term Storage of Verbal Information Are Anatomically Variable across Individuals

Eva Feredoes,¹ Giulio Tononi,² and Bradley R. Postle^1,2

Departments of ¹Psychology and ²Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706

Correspondence should be addressed to Eva Feredoes, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706. Email: feredoes{at}wisc.edu

What are the precise brain regions supporting the short-term retention of verbal information? A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study suggested that they may be topographically variable across individuals, occurring, in most, in regions posterior to prefrontal cortex (PFC), and that detection of these regions may be best suited to a single-subject (SS) approach to fMRI analysis (Feredoes and Postle, 2007). In contrast, other studies using spatially normalized group-averaged (SNGA) analyses have localized storage-related activity to PFC. To evaluate the necessity of the regions identified by these two methods, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to SS- and SNGA-identified regions throughout the retention period of a delayed letter-recognition task. Results indicated that rTMS targeting SS analysis-identified regions of left perisylvian and sensorimotor cortex impaired performance, whereas rTMS targeting the SNGA-identified region of left caudal PFC had no effect on performance. Our results support the view that the short-term retention of verbal information can be supported by regions associated with acoustic, lexical, phonological, and speech-based representation of information. They also suggest that the brain bases of some cognitive functions may be better detected by SS than by SNGA approaches to fMRI data analysis.

Key words: working memory; emergent property; prefrontal cortex; functional magnetic resonance imaging; group analyses; repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

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Received April 8, 2007; revised Aug. 23, 2007; accepted Aug. 27, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Eva Feredoes, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706. Email: feredoes{at}wisc.edu

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