title: Toward clinical application of neuropsychological activation probes with SPECT: a spatial working memory task.
abstract: The concept of working memory is central to theories of human cognition, because it is essential to human skills such as decision making and deductive reasoning. Although PET and functional MRI have provided robust data on the recruitment of specific pathways in working memory tasks, the experimental settings of these studies may not be transferable to a clinical situation. Hence, to develop neuropsychological SPECT activation probes that are suitable for daily clinical practice, this study reports on a neuropsychological activation task of spatial working memory under classical neuropsychological test conditions in healthy subjects.
  
  
  METHODS
  Reaction times and accuracy were measured as behavioral parameters and functional imaging data were analyzed with statistical parametric mapping to determine significant voxel-wise changes between the perception task and the memory task.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Subjects reacted more slowly and performed less accurately during the memory task compared with the perception task, findings that are in keeping with other neuropsychological studies. Also, the overall pattern of brain activations revealed in our experiment is consistent with the data of the literature, thereby validating our test probe.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  From a practical viewpoint, the close resemblance of the test conditions of the SPECT procedure with those of the investigation room and the relative simplicity of the task under study probably constitute major advantages for future clinical application of the SPECT procedure in patients with cognitive impairments.
authors.affiliation: Division of Nuclear Medicine, Ghent University Hospital, Belgium. ingeborg.goethals@rug.ac.be
authors.forename: Ingeborg
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Goethals
authors.forename: Kurt
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Audenaert
authors.forename: Filip
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jacobs
authors.forename: Christophe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Van De Wiele
authors.forename: Griet
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vermeir
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vandierendonck
authors.forename: Cees
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Van Heeringen
authors.forename: Rudi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dierckx
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003118:Color Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D015899:Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon