Free recall for auditorially presented spatial information was examined in a patient with a large right cerebral infarction. Despite normal verbal memory at immediate and 30-minute conditions, the patient exhibited a significant loss in verbal recall at 24 hours and a more severe deficit in the recall of the spatial components of prose passages across all delayed recall conditions. These results suggest that although the verbal code is important early in the learning process, spatial imagery exerts an increasing influence over time. Thus, reliance upon a left hemispheric mediated verbal encoding process may only allow for partial integration of linguistic and visuospatial properties. © 1990, Masson Italia Periodici s.r.l. Milano. All rights reserved.
