Dissociating visuo-spatial and verbal working memory: It’s all in the features

Visuo-spatial Working Memory

The Role of Visuo-spatial and Verbal Working Memory in L2 Japanese Reading Proficiency

Verbal working memory is recognized as a strong predictor of L2 reading development in the area of learning new vocabulary, reading comprehension, and overall L2 proficiency in alphabetic languages such as English. However, few studies have addressed if the same is true in logographic languages such as Japanese. Previous literature has indicated that phonology plays a weaker role in reading Jap...

Assessing the impact of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory load on eye-gaze cueing

Observers tend to respond more quickly to peripheral stimuli that are being gazed at by a centrally presented face, than to stimuli that are not being gazed at. While this gaze-cueing effect was initially seen as reflexive, there have also been some indications that top-down control processes may be involved. Therefore, the present investigation employed a dual-task paradigm to attempt to disru...

Visuo-spatial Working Memory and the Comprehension of Iconic Gestures

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy, collegeaged participants encoded either a series ...

Visual-spatial and verbal-spatial binding in working memory

The asymmetric pattern of binding of features in working memory is a controversial topic in the literature. The binding of visualspatial and verbal-spatial information was studied in a serial recognition task to address the contribution of spatial location, visual appearance, and verbal identity to binding in working memory. The participants (n = 32) made a recognition judgment of two sequences...