Working Memory Research Articles

Unravelling the object-based nature of visual working memory: insight from pointers.

Visual working memory (VWM) plays a crucial role in temporarily storing and processing visual information, but the nature of stored representations and their interaction with new inputs has long been unclear. The pointer system refers to how VWM links new sensory inputs to stored information using specific cues. This study aimed to investigate whether the pointer system is based on spatial, feature-based, or object-based cues by employing the repetition benefit effect, where memory performance improves with repeated memory items. Across three experiments, we manipulated spatial positions, shapes, and colors as pointer cues to determine how these features affect VWM consolidation and updating. The results showed that while spatial location serves as a strong pointer cue, shape and color features can also effectively reestablish object correspondence in VWM. These findings support the view that the pointer system in VWM is flexible and object-based, utilizing various feature cues to maintain memory continuity. This study provides new insights into how VWM connects new inputs with stored information through the pointer system.

Brain activity associated with emotion regulation predicts individual differences in working memory ability.

Previous behavioral research has found that working memory is associated with emotion regulation efficacy. However, there has been mixed evidence as to whether the neural mechanisms between emotion regulation and working memory overlap. The present study tested the prediction that individual differences on the working memory subtest of the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV) could be predicted from the pattern of brain activity produced during emotion regulation in regions typically associated with working memory, such as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). A total of 101 participants completed an emotion regulation fMRI task in which they either viewed or reappraised negative images. Participants also completed working memory test outside the scanner. A whole brain covariate analysis contrasting the reappraise negative and view negative BOLD response found that activity in the right dlPFC positively related to working memory ability. Moreover, a multivoxel pattern analysis approach using tenfold cross-validated support vector regression in regions-of-interest associated with working memory, including bilateral dlPFC, demonstrated that we could predict individual differences in working memory ability from the pattern of activity associated with emotion regulation. These findings support the idea that emotion regulation shares underlying cognitive processes and neural mechanisms with working memory, particularly in the dlPFC.

Burning fields, fading memories: exploring the effects of sugarcane burning on air quality and cognitive functioning – A case study in Northeast Thailand

This study assessed the relationship between PM2.5 concentration and the working memory of sugarcane farmers (n = 444) in Khon Kaen Province, one of the largest sugarcane producers in the Northeast region of Thailand. The relationship between the ambient PM2.5 concentrations and the working memory of sugarcane farmers was evaluated using two working memory outcomes. These outcomes included a working memory difficulty score derived from self-report of difficulty in daily tasks that require working memory and an objective memory test score consisting of a set of number recall exercises. The PM2.5 concentration data in this study were obtained from air quality monitoring stations located in the vicinity of the study locations, ensuring both precision and relevance to local air conditions. The regression results showed that farmers in the low-burn farming zone had less difficulty with working memory and better performance on number recall exercises, compared to farmers in the high-burn farming zones, even after controlling for health and socio-economic factors. Our findings highlight the potential impacts of PM2.5 exposure on the cognitive functions of farmers who burn sugarcane residues in Thailand. Our study supports the need for the government of Thailand or health agencies to establish an effective policy to reduce sugarcane residue burning in Thailand.

Meaning-Centred Coping Predicted Lower Depressive Symptoms among Caregivers with Complicated Grief.

Complicated grief is characterised by persistent low mood, intense distress and cognitive impairment. This study aimed to explore coping strategies (i.e. emotion-, problem- and meaning-centred) used by bereaved individuals facing complicated grief and how these strategies may predict psychological and cognitive outcomes. In a cross-sectional study, 20 bereaved individuals (5 males, 15 females) that aged 27 years old-65 years old (mean = 42.25, standard deviation [SD] = 9.30) were recruited following the loss of a loved one due to physical illness. Participants were screened for complicated grief and subsequently completed self-report assessments of coping strategies and depressive symptoms using Brief Grief Questionnaire (BGQ), Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced (COPE) Questionnaire, Meaning-Centered Coping Scale (MCCS) and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 Items (PHQ-9). Following that, participants underwent a neurocognitive assessment of working memory using the 2-Back task. Caregivers with complicated grief suffered from moderate severity of depressive symptoms (mean = 17.45, SD = 4.43) as they were coping with the losses. Furthermore, the findings showed that MCC significantly predicted lower levels of depressive symptoms (b = -0.50, t (16) = -2.25, P = 0.04). However, coping strategies did not significantly predict working memory performance. These findings highlight the potential benefits of MCC in alleviating depressive symptoms in bereaved individuals and underscore its contribution to the development of grief interventions. Grief therapists can emphasise this coping strategy to promote healing and resilience in patients in the grief work.

No evidence that visual impulses enhance the readout of retrieved long-term memory contents from EEG activity

Abstract The application of multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to electroencephalography (EEG) data allows neuroscientists to track neural representations at temporally fine-grained scales. This approach has been leveraged to study the locus and evolution of long-term memory contents in the brain, but a limiting factor is that decoding performance remains low. A key reason for this is that processes like encoding and retrieval are intrinsically dynamic across trials and participants, and this runs in tension with MVPA and other techniques that rely on consistently unfolding neural codes to generate predictions about memory contents. The presentation of visually perturbing stimuli may experimentally regularize brain dynamics, making neural codes more stable across measurements to enhance representational readouts. Such enhancements, which have repeatedly been demonstrated in working memory contexts, could offer a tool to improve decoding in long-term memory tasks. In this study, we evaluated whether visual perturbations—or pings—improve our ability to predict the category of retrieved images from EEG activity during cued recall. Overall, our findings suggest that while pings evoked a prominent neural response, they did not reliably produce improvements in MVPA-based classification across several analyses. We discuss possibilities that could explain these results, including the role of experimental and analysis parameter choices and mechanistic differences between working and long-term memory.

Formation of the Industrial Police on the Territory of the Donetsk Coal-Mining Basin (Pre-Soviet Period)

Introduction. Development of the industrial production in the regions becomes possible on condition of attracting the labour resources and creating the appropriate socio-economic conditions, acceptable living, training and leisure opportunities for employees. Solving these tasks results in formation of the industrial clusters and development of the settlements with the city-forming industrial enterprises. The settlements that have emerged as an evidence of the technological progress and as a result of formation of the economic relationships differ from the settlements and cities formed under the dominating influence of the agricultural and commercial sectors. First of all, the differences refer to the intensity of migration flows, quick emergence of the agglomerations consisting of the class-homogeneous labour collectives represented by the proletariat (including the stratum of engineers and craftsmen). For this reason, during formation of the industrial sector in the Russian Empire in the second half of the XIX century, a special kind of internal affairs authorities called the “industrial police” had evolved, which were partly funded at the expense of the extrabudgetary funds of the served enterprises. These practices had spread throughout the Donetsk coal-mining basin, which included an immense territory from the city of Shakhty, Rostov region (former Aleksandrovsk-Grushevskii, Province of the Don Cossack Host) – in the east to the city of Donetsk, Donetsk People's Republic (former Yuzovka, Yekaterinoslav province) – in the west. Nowadays, a scientific study of the industrial police formation process on the territory of Donbass is relevant and especially valuable due to the fact that from 2022 the coal-mining basin has become an integral part of the Russian Federation and because it possesses the vast historical and industrial-production experience of joint development and cooperation of its constituent regions, including in the field of law enforcement activities. Therefore, the paper targets to investigate the process of formation of the industrial police on the territory of the Donetsk coal-mining basin (at the pre–Soviet period).Materials and Methods. The objects of the study were the legal relations referring to the formation and development of the industrial police on the territory of the Donetsk coal-mining basin in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. The study was carried out based on the empirical analysis of the history of the law enforcement authorities on the territory of the Donetsk coal-mining basin. While preparing the article, the principle of historicism was applied, historicallegal, dogmatic legal and system-structural methods of scientific research were used. Along with the specific scientific methods of jurisprudence knowledge, the general scientific methods of synthesis, induction and deduction, as well as the comparative, systemic and cognitive methods were used.Results. A scientific concept of the Donbass law enforcement system, which had existed at the turn of the XIX– XX centuries within the Province of the Don Cossack Host and had represented a specific subject of the Russian Empire in the pre-Soviet period, was formed. The regulatory legal acts, which had been the basis for the emergence and development of the industrial police, ensuring protection of the public order and safety, were identified and studied. The historically justified key dates of the Donbass industrial police formation were distinguished and might be used in the moral, psychological and memorial work, demonstrating the unity of the population living on the territory of the Donetsk coalmining basin in the past and future.Discussion and Conclusion. Enforcement of the law is an important part of the law enforcement function of the state and is being ensured across the whole territory of the Russian Federation, including the “new regions” of Russia, which had been previously detached from it in 1991 due to undoing the USSR. Therefore, the research in the historical and legal development of the industrial police of the Donetsk coal-mining basin demonstrates the historical unity of the peoples of Donbass throughout the single state. The conclusions drawn by the authors upon the conducted research directly refer to ensuring the national ideological security of the Russian Federation.

Memory-enhancing activity of verapamil in murine models of stress

Purpose: To evaluate the benefit of verapamil on stress-induced memory impairment in mice. Methods: Forty-eight (48) mice were used in this study. They were divided into two equal groups based on the two models of stress used in this study (sleep deprivation and hypoxia). Each model was further divided into 4 groups of six animals each. The mice in the sleep deprivation model were suspended on a platform above water while in the hypoxic model, mice were locked in an airless container for 20 min daily throughout the experiment. As for the intervention, 25 and 50 mg/kg verapamil were preadministered via the oral route to study groups, except the normal control group and negative control group in both models. After seven-day stress and intervention, the mice were subjected to behavioural tests (Y-maze and object recognition tests), biochemical assays (for acetylcholinesterase activity) and histochemical analysis. Results: Stress caused a significant (p < 0.05) impairment in the consolidation and retrieval of working and recognition memories. Also, acetylcholinesterase activity was significantly (p < 0.05) enhanced in the stressed groups when compared to control groups. Similarly, the histological analysis revealed a significant decline in population (p < 0.05), distribution and density of viable neurons in specific areas of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. These alterations were significantly (p < 0.05) attenuated in verapamil-treated groups almost in a dose-dependent pattern. Conclusion: Verapamil displays significant memory-enhancing effects in two (2) murine models of stress. Antihypertensives should therefore be considered a viable prospect in the management of stress-related memory disorders after additional studies have been done to establish the mechanisms of action.

An fMRI study of phrase structure and subject island violations.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. In order to facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted an fMRI experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using event-related potentials. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

Pre-choice midbrain fluctuations affect self-control in food choice: A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study.

Recent studies have shown that spontaneous pre-stimulus fluctuations in brain activity affect higher-order cognitive processes, including risky decision-making, cognitive flexibility, and aesthetic judgments. However, there is currently no direct evidence to suggest that pre-choice activity influences value-based decisions that require self-control. We examined the impact of fluctuations in pre-choice activity in key regions of the reward system on self-control in food choice. In the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, 49 participants made 120 food choices that required self-control in high and low working memory load conditions. The task was designed to ensure that participants were cognitively engaged and not thinking about upcoming choices. We defined self-control success as choosing a food item that was healthier over one that was tastier. The brain regions of interest (ROIs) were the ventral tegmental area (VTA), putamen, nucleus accumbens (NAc), and caudate nucleus. For each participant and condition, we calculated the mean activity in the 3-s interval preceding the presentation of food stimuli in successful and failed self-control trials. These activities were then used as predictors of self-control success in a fixed-effects logistic regression model. The results indicate that increased pre-choice VTA activity was linked to a higher probability of self-control success in a subsequent food-choice task within the low-load condition, but not in the high-load condition. We posit that pre-choice fluctuations in VTA activity change the reference point for immediate (taste) reward evaluation, which may explain our finding. This suggests that the neural context of decisions may be a key factor influencing human behavior.

Investigation of comparative Nonword repetition performance in multiple sclerosis: Group differences, subtype variations, and disability effects

This study investigated Nonword Repetition (NWR) tasks in individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) compared to healthy controls (HC), focusing on phonological working memory (WMP). Significant differences were found in NWR acurracy (NWRacc) score between MS subgroups and HC (H = 48.2, p < 0.001). NWRacc decreased as the number of syllables increased in both groups, indicating increased cognitive load. All MS subtypes showed lower NWRacc compared to HC across varying syllable lengths (Mann Whitney U Test: two syllables U = 64.5, p < 0.001; three syllables U = 183, p < 0.001; four syllables U = 248, p < 0.001; five syllables U = 283.5, p < 0.001). However, no significant differences were found within MS subtypes based on syllable length. NWRacc did not differ between mild and severe MS groups. Overall, the NWR test effectively assessed WMP in MS, highlighting its utility in diagnosing and addressing language-cognitive challenges in individuals with MS. This underscores the importance of tailored intervention strategies to mitigate these challenges.

Working Memory Capacity for Mid-Air Gestures in Human–Computer Interaction

Mid-air gesture interactions have emerged as one of the predominant modalities used in human-computer interaction (HCI). However, extant research on gestures predominantly concentrates on the design of gestures for singular functionalities, which requires a comprehensive investigation into gesture interaction design from an integrative HCI system perspective. Working memory capacity plays a pivotal role in constraining the number of gestures accommodated within an HCI system. This study adopts the change detection paradigm to conduct an empirical investigation into the working memory capacities associated with mid-air gestures, aiming to elucidate the working memory capacity for such gestures. The experimental design included two independent variables: five distinct categories of mid-air gestures (physical, symbolic, metaphorical, abstract, and mixed) and memory set sizes ranging from two to nine items. The findings revealed that working memory capacities for different types of gestures fluctuate between three and five items, with symbolic gestures presenting the most negligible cognitive load for recall and abstract gestures proving to be the most challenging. The outcomes of this research have significant implications for both the design of individual gestures and the overarching design of gesture interaction systems, serving as a valuable reference for future endeavors in HCI design optimization.

Contextualised retrieval practice: the effect of context type and working memory capacity on word retention

ABSTRACT The present study on intentional retrieval practice compared the benefits of presenting words in either informative or uninformative sentence contexts. Participants first studied a list of English words with their translations. Then, they were all exposed to half of the words with informative sentences containing meaning clues in the Context Inference (CI) condition and half with uninformative sentences devoid of such clues in the Memory Retrieval (MR) condition as part of retrieval-based practising. Participants were required to type the L1 translation for each word presented using a mobile application. Data were collected by both form-recall and meaning-recall tests immediately afterwards and then a week later. In addition, this study focused on the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and word retention in these two conditions to explore the suggestion that individuals may benefit differently from retrieval practices. Although the results showed that both conditions contributed to word retention, the MR condition was significantly more effective than the CI condition for the participants’ long-term retention. Further, the results revealed an overall positive effect of WMC on word retention in both conditions, with high-WMC individuals achieving higher retention scores than low-WMC individuals. However, this effect was not modulated by the type of context condition.

Acute optogenetic induction of the prodromal endophenotype of CA1 hyperactivity causes schizophrenia-related deficits in cognition and salience attribution.

Hyperactivity of the human anterior hippocampus has been reported to spread from its CA1 subfield to the subiculum around the onset of first-episode psychosis and could be a cellular target for early therapeutic intervention in the schizophrenia prodrome. However, to what extent CA1 hyperactivity actually causes schizophrenia-related symptoms remains unknown. Here, we mimic this endophenotype by direct optogenetic activation of excitatory cells in the homologous mouse region, ventral CA1 (vCA1) and assess its consequence in multiple schizophrenia-related behavioural tests. We find that hyperactivity of vCA1 causes hyperlocomotion and impairments of spatial and object-related short-term habituation (spatial novelty-preference and novel-object recognition memory) and spatial working memory, whereas social interaction, spatial exploration, and anxiety remain unaltered. Stimulation of the ventral subiculum, in contrast, only increased locomotion and exploration. In conclusion, CA1 hyperactivity may be a direct driver of prodromal cognitive symptoms and of aberrant salience assignment leading to psychosis.

A gradual transition toward categorical representations along the visual hierarchy during working memory, but not perception.

The ability to stably maintain visual information over brief delays is central to healthy cognitive functioning, as is the ability to differentiate such internal representations from external inputs. One possible way to achieve both is via multiple concurrent mnemonic representations along the visual hierarchy that differ systematically from the representations of perceptual inputs. To test this possibility, we examine orientation representations along the visual hierarchy during perception and working memory. Human participants directly viewed, or held in mind, oriented grating patterns, and the similarity between fMRI activation patterns for different orientations was calculated throughout retinotopic cortex. During direct viewing of grating stimuli, similarity was relatively evenly distributed amongst all orientations, while during working memory the similarity was higher around oblique orientations. We modeled these differences in representational geometry based on the known distribution of orientation information in the natural world: The "veridical" model uses an efficient coding framework to capture hypothesized representations during visual perception. The "categorical" model assumes that different "psychological distances" between orientations result in orientation categorization relative to cardinal axes. During direct perception, the veridical model explained the data well. During working memory, the categorical model gradually gained explanatory power over the veridical model for increasingly anterior retinotopic regions. Thus, directly viewed images are represented veridically, but once visual information is no longer tethered to the sensory world there is a gradual progression to more categorical mnemonic formats along the visual hierarchy.

Working Memory Performance Predicts, but Does Not Reduce, Cocaine and Cannabinoid Seeking in Adult Male Rats.

Cognitive deficits reflecting impaired executive function are commonly associated with psychiatric disorders, including substance use. Cognitive training is proposed to improve treatment outcomes for these disorders by promoting neuroplasticity within the prefrontal cortex, enhancing executive control, and mitigating cognitive decline due to drug use. Additionally, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) can facilitate plasticity in the prefrontal cortex and reduce drug-seeking behaviors. We investigated whether working memory training could elevate BDNF levels in the prefrontal cortex and if this training would predict or protect against cocaine or cannabinoid seeking. Adult male rats were trained to perform a "simple" or "complex" version of a delayed-match-to-sample working memory task. Rats then self-administered cocaine or the synthetic cannabinoid WIN55,212-2 and were tested for cued drug seeking during abstinence. Tissue from the prefrontal cortex and dorsal hippocampus was analyzed for BDNF protein expression. Training on the working memory task enhanced endogenous BDNF protein levels in the prelimbic prefrontal cortex but not the dorsal hippocampus. Working memory training did not impact self-administration of either drug but predicted the extent of WIN self-administration and cocaine seeking during abstinence. These results suggest that working memory training promotes endogenous BDNF but does not alter drug-seeking or drug-taking behavior. However, individual differences in cognitive performance before drug exposure may predict vulnerability to future drug use.

Age-Related Listening Performance Changes Across Adulthood.

This study compares auditory processing performance across different decades of adulthood, including young adults and middle-aged individuals with normal hearing and no spontaneous auditory complaints. We assessed 80 participants with normal hearing, at least 10 years of education, and normal global cognition. The participants completed various auditory tests, including speech-in-noise, dichotic digits, duration, pitch pattern sequence, gap in noise, and masking level difference. In addition, we conducted working memory assessments and administered a questionnaire on self-perceived hearing difficulties. Our findings revealed significant differences in auditory test performance across different age groups, except for the masking level difference. The youngest group outperformed all other age groups in the speech-in-noise test, while differences in dichotic listening and temporal resolution emerged from the age of 40 and in temporal ordering from the age of 50. Moreover, higher education levels and better working memory test scores were associated with better auditory performance as individuals aged. However, the influence of these factors varied across different auditory tests. It is interesting that we observed increased self-reported hearing difficulties with age, even in participants without spontaneous auditory complaints. Our study highlights significant variations in auditory test performance, with noticeable changes occurring from age 30 and becoming more pronounced from age 40 onward. As individuals grow older, they tend to perceive more hearing difficulties. Furthermore, the impact of age on auditory processing performance is influenced by factors such as education and working memory.

Effect of negative emotional stimuli on working memory: Impact of voluntary and automatic attention.

Emotions are known to influence cognitive performance, particularly working memory (WM) in both its aspects, processing, and maintenance. One explanatory mechanism might be that negative stimuli capture attentional resources, leaving fewer resources for attentional maintenance and processing of information in WM. However, this attentional capture was only investigated using WM tasks in which participants were explicitly asked to process negative items. The aim of this paper was to determine whether explicit processing of emotional stimuli is necessary to impair WM performance, or if their mere presence is enough to capture attention. For this purpose, participants performed a complex span task in which they alternated between memorizing a series of neutral words and processing either emotional images or neutral ones. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to explicitly process emotional images, whereas in Experiment 2, emotional images were presented without any processing being required. In both experiments, we observed a decrease in memory performance when the images were negative compared to neutral. Whether or not voluntary processing is involved, emotional images seem to capture attentional resources, which in turn leads to a decline in memory performance. These results were discussed in relation to attentional theories and the influence of emotion on the specific mechanisms of WM.

Comparative effects of open-skill and closed-skill sports on executive function in university students: a 16-week quasi-experimental study.

Previous reviews have often concluded that open-skill sports are more effective at enhancing executive function (EF) than closed-skill sports. However, this conclusion may not hold for closed-skill sports with high cognitive demands, such as golf. This study aimed to compare the effects of football (open-skill) and golf (closed-skill) training on enhancing EF in university students. Using a quasi-experimental, pre-post test design, 63 male participants were assigned to three groups: football (n = 21), golf (n = 21), and a sedentary control group (n = 21). Over 16 weeks of training, the intervention groups engaged in four 90-min training sessions per week, while the control group attended one 80-min physical education class per week. Assessments were conducted before and after the intervention. EFs, including inhibition control and working memory, were assessed using the Flanker task and Corsi-block tapping task, respectively. Cardiovascular fitness (CRF) was measured by the multi-stage fitness test. The golf group showed significant improvements in inhibition control from pre- to post-intervention (p = 0.02, d = 0.26), while the football and control groups did not exhibit significant changes. Post-intervention comparisons indicated no significant differences in EF performance between the golf and football groups; however, both outperformed the control group (golf, p = 0.002, d = 0.99; football, p = 0.01, d = 0.67). No significant improvement was observed in working memory for any group. Additionally, changes in CRF were not significantly correlated with EF performance. This study provides preliminary evidence that golf, a closed-skill sport with high cognitive demands, can effectively improve inhibitory control after 16 weeks of training. This improvement is comparable to that observed in football, an open-skill sport. The findings also suggest that the cognitive demands of the sports, rather than improvements in physical fitness, may be primarily responsible for the enhancements in EF.

Word length and frequency effects in natural Chinese reading: Evidence for character representations in lexical identification.

Word length and frequency are two of the "big three" factors that affect eye movements in natural reading. Although these factors have been extensively investigated, all previous studies manipulating word length have been confounded with changes in visual complexity (longer words have more letters and are more visually complex). We controlled stroke complexity across one-character (short) and two-character (long) high- and low-frequency Chinese words (to avoid complexity confounds) and recorded readers' eye movements during sentence reading. Both word length and frequency yielded strong main effects for fixation time measures. For saccadic targeting and skipping probability, word length effects, but not word frequency effects, occurred. Critically, the interaction was not significant regardless of stroke complexity, indicating that word length and frequency independently influence lexical identification and saccade target selection during Chinese reading. The results provide evidence for character-level representations during Chinese word recognition in natural reading.

How well can simple clinical features predict long-term language recovery after left-hemisphere glioma surgery?

Long-term language recovery after left-hemisphere glioma surgery varies substantially across patients. We investigated how well it can be predicted using clinical variables such as the postoperative decline in language processing, tumor grade, resection volume and location, extent of resection, and intraoperative language mapping. Beyond predicting the overall recovery, we examined which domains of language processing are most prone to persistent deficits. Fifty-nine patients with left-hemisphere gliomas completed the Russian Aphasia Test (RAT) before surgery, immediately after surgery, and at follow-up three to seventeen months after surgery. We modeled their average language score (Generalized Aphasia Quotient, GAQ) at follow-up using a cross-validated multiple linear regression and calculated the number of patients showing persistent deficits in each subtest of the RAT. The difference between GAQ scores at follow-up and before surgery was not significant at the group level but varied substantially across patients (mean -1.3%, range -34.2-9.2%). Our best-performing model predicted the follow-up GAQ scores with the mean absolute error of 3.5% (cross-validated R2 = 0.15). A greater decline in language processing immediately after surgery predicted worse recovery, whereas intraoperative language mapping predicted better recovery. Deficits in sentence repetition, verb production, verb and sentence comprehension, and object naming most often persisted at follow-up. The postoperative decline in language processing and intraoperative language mapping explain a substantial amount of variability in long-term language recovery. Verbal working memory and lexical retrieval, particularly that of verbs, are most prone to persistent deficits.