The fan effect in fMRI: left hemisphere specialization in verbal working memory

We studied the fan effect of verbal working memory using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants were presented with a sentence-pair matching task that described semantic relationships (e.g. classroom-school). Working memory load and semantic processing were manipulated by increasing the number of sentences to be remembered and varying whether they matched expectation. Increased working memory load elicited activation in left …