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tagsneuroscience, depression, cognition, memory, executive-function, behavioral-assay

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Spatial Working Memory (SWM)

The Spatial Working Memory (SWM) task is a cantab test of visuospatial information retention and manipulation. It is self-ordered, with notable executive function demands, providing a measure of both working memory errors and strategy.

Administration time: 4-6 minutes

Task Format

An array of coloured squares (boxes) is shown on a touchscreen. The participant searches for a yellow token in each box using a process of elimination, then places each found token into an empty column on the right-hand side of the screen. The number of boxes increases progressively up to a maximum of 12.

Crucially, the colour and position of the boxes change from trial to trial to discourage stereotyped search strategies. Participants must not return to a box in which they have previously found a token — requiring active maintenance of visited locations.

Outcome Measures

  • Between Errors: Selecting boxes already found to be empty
  • Within Errors: Revisiting boxes that previously contained a token
  • Strategy: Measure of the participant’s ability to adopt an efficient search pattern

Depression Relevance

Patients with depression have moderate impairments in working memory (Rock et al., 2013). Working memory is a critical cognitive skill for a range of everyday tasks, and its impairment in depression contributes to functional disability.

SWM differs from delayed-match-to-sample in that it requires self-ordered searching and active strategy use, rather than simple recognition memory.

Beyond depression, SWM is validated for: Alzheimer’s disease, autism spectrum disorder, Down’s syndrome, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, stroke, and traumatic brain injury.

cantab | delayed-match-to-sample | nonverbal-cognitive-tasks | preclinical-drug-screening

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