Visual-spatial and verbal-spatial binding in working memory

ABSTRACT

The asymmetric pattern of binding of features in working memory is a controversial topic in the literature. The binding of visual- spatial 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 of four stimuli each based on a relevant dimension while ignoring changes in an irrelevant dimension. In the visual and verbal tasks, the location was irrelevant. In the spatial tasks, the visual or verbal dimension was irrelevant. Our data showed that the visual or verbal characteristics of the object were incidentally encoded with the spatial location, but the spatial location of the items was not codified together with either the verbal features or visual characteristics when a verbal strategy was limited by articulatory suppression. This asymmetry in binding memory when the participants had to retain one of the features that was presented suggests a functional interaction between specific components of modalities of information and a system that maintains the multimodal representation.