ABSTRACT
Temporary retention of verbal or visual information and its active manipulation are intrinsically involved in working memory tasks. The importance of the frontal cortex in working memory has been demonstrated using a wide variety of techniques, including lesion studies in monkeys and patients1,2 aswellas functional neuroimaging in healthy human volunteers3,4. Inaddition, it has been reported that age-related degeneration of the frontal cortex is greater than the degeneration of other areas of the human brain5, and Alzheimer’s disease patients have less total prefrontal cortex gray matter than agematched healthy subjects6. In one study, specifically examining the effect of estrogen on prefrontal cortex-dependent working memory, Duff and Hampson7 found that healthy postmenopausal women taking estrogen exhibited significantly better performance on both verbal (Digit Ordering) and spatial (Spatial Working Memory) working memory tasks, but did not differ from healthy non-users on control tasks involving simple passive recall.
