Influence of working memory on stimulus generalization in anomia treatment: A pilot study

Neuropsychological testing of distinct cognitive domains holds promise as a prognostic indicator of aphasia therapy success; however, it is unclear the degree to which cognitive assessments may also predict generalization abilities. The present study aimed to assess the relationship between working memory skills and stimulus generalization from a visual picture-naming treatment to an auditory definition-naming task. Seven individuals with aphasia completed verbal and nonverbal assessments of working memory prior to participating in a cued picture-naming treatment for anomia. After treatment ended, stimulus generalization percentages were calculated for definition naming for the same items that were trained using picture naming. Scores on two nonverbal working memory measures, the backward spatial span and the 1-back, and one verbal working memory assessment, the picture span, were positively correlated with generalization percentage. These results provide preliminary evidence of the relationship between working memory and stimulus generalization. When comparing performance across working memory measures, the spatial span and the picture span were highly correlated in this sample. We propose that despite the verbal and nonverbal distinction, these tasks may have tapped into working memory similarly by relying on a shared central processing mechanism.