Task- and age-effects in functional neuroimaging studies of working memory – a quantitative meta-analysis

Introduction: Impairment of working memory is found in patients suffering from a variety of neuro-psychiatric disorders such as dementia, Parkinson's disease or schizophrenia. The neurobiological basis of this function and its socio-economically highly relevant impairment, however, are still largely unclear. While there is already a large number of functional imaging studies investigating the neural correlates of the working memory1, their results are often nonuniform and partly contradictory. To allow more generalisable inference about the involved brain regions as well as their age dependence we here report a…