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Abstract
By adopting a constructivist theoretical framework from the cognitive mapping studies of environmental psychology, this study set out to explore, for the first time, the formation of spatial memories of a large-scale, real-world environment in twenty subjects who had undergone unilateral temporal-lobe surgery (11 left, 9 right), and to compare performance to that of 10 matched normal control subjects. Subjects were assessed on a range of learning and memory tasks after viewing videotape presentations of routes through a novel urban area.
Deficits were apparent after both left and right temporal-lobe surgery. Both patient groups required significantly more exposures to the video before a criterion level of learning for scene recognition was reached. The right temporal-lobe group were alone in being significantly impaired on judgements of the proximity of landmarks, but on tests of distance estimation, route planning, route execution, locational accuracy and sketch map representation of the stimulus area, significant impairments were observed in both the left and right temporal-lobe resection groups relative to the normal control group, although not always for similar reasons. A combination of two variables in particular, proximity and route planning, discriminated between the three subject groups to a degree much greater than expected by chance, revealing the importance of their roles in cognitive map formation.
Findings suggest a role for both right and left human temporal lobes in differing aspects of spatial representations of real-world environments, which has implications for traditional dichotomous classifications of brain functioning.
