Keeping Order in the Brain: the Supramarginal Gyrus and Serial Order in Short-Term Memory
cortex 119 (2019) 89e99 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex Research Report Keeping order in the brain: The supramarginal gyrus and serial order in short-term memory Giacomo Guidalia,b, Alberto Pisonia, Nadia Bologninia,c and * Costanza Papagnoa,d, a Department of Psychology & Milan Center for Neuroscience - NeuroMI, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy b Ph.D. program in Neuroscience, School of Medicine and Surgery, University of Milano-Bicocca, Monza, Italy c Laboratory of Neuropsychology, IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milan, Italy d CIMeC & CeRiN, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy article info abstract Article history: A wide range of human activities are performed sequentially in few seconds. We need to Received 13 December 2018 maintain a correct temporal order of words in language, movements in actions, directions Reviewed 5 February 2019 in navigation, etc. Therefore, it is plausible, in a more economical perspective, that our Revised 22 February 2019 brain is equipped with a dedicated mechanism for storing a temporal sequence for a short Accepted 10 April 2019 time. To investigate it, we run four TMS experiments, in which participants performed Action editor Eric Wassermann different short-term memory tasks, i.e., three (verbal, spatial, motor) requiring mainte- Published online 20 April 2019 nance of an ordered sequence and one (visual) of a static pattern. We demonstrated, for the first time, that the left supramarginal gyrus is one of the key nodes of the STM network Keywords: involved in retaining an abstract representation of serial order information, independently Short-term memory from the content information, namely the nature of the item to be remembered, which Serial order instead is stored separately.
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