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Updated: May 22, 2026
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The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
Spatial working memory for locations specified by vision and audition: testing the amodality hypothesis
Jack M Loomis1, Roberta L Klatzky, Brendan McHugh
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. jmloomis99@gmail.com
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
|May 4, 2012
Summary
Spatial working memory uses modality-specific tags for recent visual and auditory inputs. However, longer-term spatial representations in working memory appear to be amodal, meaning they lose their original sensory details.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Sensory Processing
Background:
- Spatial working memory (SWM) is crucial for integrating sensory information.
- It is debated whether SWM representations retain sensory modality information or become abstract.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if spatial representations in working memory retain modality-specific tags (visual, auditory) or become amodal.
- To determine the impact of cross-modal versus intra-modal sequences on SWM performance.
Main Methods:
- Participants performed a repetition detection task with auditory, visual, or mixed-modality spatial sequences.
- Response latencies were measured to assess working memory costs.
- Ancillary tasks verified perceptual comparability of visual and auditory stimuli.
Main Results:
- A significant "switching cost" was observed for mixed-modality sequences when the modality changed between consecutive targets.
- This cost suggests that recently encoded spatial representations retain modality-specific features.
- No significant cost was found for mixed-modality sequences when targets were not immediately successive, implying amodal representations over longer durations.
Conclusions:
- Spatial images in working memory initially retain modality-specific tags, influencing performance on immediate cross-modal switches.
- Enduring spatial representations within working memory appear to be amodal, losing their original sensory characteristics over time.
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