The effects of environmental support and secondary tasks on visuospatial working memory

Abstract

The present experiments examined the effects of environmental support on participants’ ability to rehearse locations and its role in the effects of secondary tasks on memory span. In Experiment 1, the duration of inter-item intervals and the presence of environmental support for visuospatial rehearsal (i.e., the array of possible memory locations) during the inter-item intervals were both manipulated across four tasks. When support was provided, memory spans increased as the inter-item interval durations increased, consistent with the hypothesis that environmental support facilitates rehearsal. In contrast, when environmental support was not provided, spans decreased as the duration of the inter-item intervals increased, consistent with the hypothesis that visuospatial memory representations decay when rehearsal is impeded. In Experiment 2, the ratio of inter-item interval duration to inter-trial interval duration was kept the same on all four tasks in order to hold temporal distinctiveness constant, yet forgetting was still observed in the absence of environmental support, consistent with the decay hypothesis. In Experiment 3, the effects of impeding rehearsal were compared to the effects of verbal and visuospatial secondary processing tasks. Forgetting of locations was greater when presentation of to-be-remembered locations alternated with performance of a secondary task than when rehearsal was impeded by the absence of environmental support. The greatest forgetting occurred when a secondary task required processing visuospatial information, suggesting that in addition to decay, both domain-specific and domain-general effects contribute to forgetting on visuospatial working memory tasks.

Gaze‐based rehearsal in children under 7: a developmental investigation of eye movements during a serial spatial memory task

“…This evidence is consistent with the idea that gazes during retention reflect attempts to keep the spatial list in mind, analogously to using speech to support memory for verbal information. Other evidence is likewise consistent with the hypothesis that overt fixations toward to-be-remembered spatial positions boost memory (e.g.,; Guérard & Tremblay, 2011;Guérard, Tremblay, & Saint-Aubin, 2009;Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014), although overt fixations are apparently of limited use for supporting recall compared to covert oculomotor planning (Godijn & Theeuwes, 2013;Pearson, Ball, & Smith, 2014).…”

Effects of age and environmental support for rehearsal on visuospatial working memory.

“…In a single experimental session that lasted approximately 1.5 hours, each participant performed four conditions of a visuospatial simple span task (see Figure 1) that were largely identical to the task conditions used by Lilienthal et al (2014) in their Experiment 1. In each of the four conditions, participants were shown an array of 30 circles on a computer screen.…”

“…Accordingly, Lilienthal et al (2014) investigated whether visuospatial rehearsal, and thus visuospatial memory, was affected by the presence or absence of environmental support during inter-item intervals. In two experiments, when environmental support was present (i.e., participants viewed the array of possible locations during inter-item intervals), young adults’ memory spans were significantly larger with long (4.0 s) inter-item intervals than with short (1.0 s) intervals, whereas when environmental support was absent (i.e., participants viewed a blank screen during inter-item intervals), memory spans were significantly smaller with long inter-item intervals.…”

What limits working memory capacity?

“…Hence, at least for verbal memoranda, whether or not memory declines over a filled RI depends on the variability of distractor processing (see Figure 7). At the same time, some studies using visual or spatial memoranda have found that extending the duration of the RI impairs memory even in the absence of a concurrent processing task (B3; Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014;Mercer & McKeown, 2014;Ricker & Cowan, 2010).…”