Abstract
Most general theories on serial order working memory (WM) assume the existence of position markers that are bound to the to-be-remembered items to keep track of the serial order. So far, the exact cognitive/neural characteristics of these markers have remained largely underspecified, while direct empirical evidence for their existence is mostly lacking. In the current study we demonstrate that retrieval from verbal serial order WM can be facilitated or hindered by spatial cuing: begin elements of a verbal WM sequence are retrieved faster after cuing the left side of space, while end elements are retrieved faster after cuing the right side of space. In direct complement to our previous work—where we showed the reversed impact of WM retrieval on spatial processing—we argue that the current findings provide us with a crucial piece of evidence suggesting a direct and functional involvement of space in verbal serial order WM. We outline the idea that serial order in verbal WM is coded within a spatial coordinate system with spatial attention being involved when searching through WM, and we discuss how this account can explain several hallmark observations related to serial order WM.
Highlights
Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive function and refers to the brief maintenance of information in an active and accessible state such that operations can be performed on it
A new idea to account for serial order coding in WM was proposed—but not further developed—by Oberauer ([8]; p. 53) who suggested that a “spatial medium of representation [is used] as a projection screen for relations on nonspatial dimensions”—such as serial order. We further developed this into what we refer to as the mental whiteboard hypothesis: (I) The position markers that provide multi-item WM with a serial context should be understood as coordinates within an internal, spatially defined system; (II) internal spatial attention is involved in searching through the resulting serial order representation; and (III) retrieval corresponds to selection by spatial attention [9]
The WM-position by Dot-location interaction was significant [Wilks’ lambda = .91, F(3,16) = 15.09, p < .001, ηp2 = .74] (Fig. 1A), supporting the hypothesis that WM retrieval is influenced by the visuospatial primes
Summary
Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive function and refers to the brief maintenance of information in an active and accessible state such that operations can be performed on it. It can be stated that the most prominent models in this domain are built on the idea that serial order coding in WM is achieved by binding the various items to-be-maintained to specific position markers (e.g., begin vs end items [3]; encoding strength [4]; oscillatory response [5]; magnitude codes [6]). Despite their (relative) success in accounting for several empirical observations, these models are largely
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