Auditory and visual spatial working memory

Lehnert, G.; Zimmer, Hubert D.

doi:10.3758/bf03193254

Cited by 37 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(59 reference statements)

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“…Pianists who are primarily experienced as accompanists may show higher divided attention than piano soloists, and conductors' skills may to some degree be shaped by the musical genres and the repertoire they perform. Furthermore, our results point to higher visual spans as compared to auditory spans, which is in line with a previous study by Lehnert and Zimmer (2006). On the other hand, the score-based approach of classical Western musicians may particularly strengthen visual modalities of information processing.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Wöllner

Halpern

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Individuals with high working memory (WM) capacity also tend to have better selective and divided attention. Although both capacities are essential for skilled performance in many areas, evidence for potential training and expertise effects is scarce. We investigated the attentional flexibility of musical conductors by comparing them to equivalently trained pianists. Conductors must focus their attention both on individual instruments and on larger sections of different instruments. We studied students and professionals in both domains to assess the contributions of age and training to these skills. Participants completed WM span tests for auditory and visual (notated) pitches and timing durations, as well as long-term memory tests. In three dichotic attention tasks, they were asked to detect small pitch and timing deviations from two melodic streams presented in baseline (separate streams), selective-attention (concentrating on only one stream), and divided-attention (concentrating on targets in both streams simultaneously) conditions. Conductors were better than pianists in detecting timing deviations in divided attention, and experts detected more targets than students. We found no group differences for WM capacity or for pitch deviations in the attention tasks, even after controlling for the older age of the experts. Musicians' WM spans across multimodal conditions were positively related to selective and divided attention. High-WM participants also had shorter reaction times in selective attention. Taken together, conductors showed higher attentional flexibility in successfully switching between different foci of attention.Keywords Selective and divided attention . Working memory . Long-term memory . Multimodal . Expertise . Cognitive aging Auditory processing, by its nature, requires considerable investment of executive resources. Auditory information is evanescent and can vary rapidly over short time intervals. Thus, both attending to the signal and buffering of information in the auditory stream are vital to comprehending everything from speech to birdsong to music. In this investigation, we examined the attentional and working memory (WM) capacities, and the relation between them, in a profession that should demand the highest level of auditory executive capacity: musical conductors.Several kinds of attention are essential to parse the auditory world. Considering first selective attention, Fritz, Elhilali, David, and Shamma (2007) observed that in everyday situations we constantly must extract features such as harmonicity, intensity, duration, and rhythm in order to group, identify, and locate auditory objects, even above and beyond the challenge of following one conversation among many, as in the "cocktail party problem" (Cherry, 1953). In other words, we need proficiency at auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990;Fritz et al., 2007). We normally accomplish this analysis quite well with both top-down and bottom-up control processes-by, for instance, increasing activity in relevant and decreasin...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Wöllner

Halpern

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…This suggests that manipulation of phonological representations of lexical items in working memory is represented in the same neural regions as the manipulation of visual representations, indicating that similar cognitive processes may be involved. In tune with the results of Lehnert and Zimmer (2006), this study also suggests a common store for spatial representation of auditory and visual information, and thus provides further support for a working memory component such as the episodic buffer.…”

Section: The Episodic Buffer and Visuospatial Processingsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…However, behavioural data showed that mixed order recall was also more taxing than separate order recall, and thus differential neural activation may also reflect executive processes. It is interesting to note that while results of the Lehnert and Zimmer (2006) study suggest a common store for spatial representation of auditory and visual information, the results of Zhang et al (2004) suggest a common store for order representation of auditory and visual information.…”

Section: The Episodic Buffer and Neuroimagingmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…However, later investigation provided evidence for dissociation of visual and spatial subsystems (Klauer and Zhao 2004). Lehnert and Zimmer (2006) conducted a series of three experiments to investigate the spatial subsystem, by studying short-term memory for the location of sounds and pictures presented at varying locations in space. They hypothesized that if there are two independent spatial stores for auditory and visual representations, memory performance should be higher for location sequences in which sounds and pictures are mixed than for sequences in which they are separate.…”

Section: The Episodic Buffer and Visuospatial Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of the episodic buffer in working memory for language processing

Rudner

Rönnberg

2007

Cogn Process

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A body of work has accumulated to show that the cognitive process of binding information from different mnemonic and sensory sources as well as in different linguistic modalities can be fractionated from general executive functions in working memory both functionally and neurally. This process has been defined in terms of the episodic buffer (Baddeley in Trends Cogn Sci 4(11):417-423, 2000). This paper considers behavioural, neuropsychological and neuroimaging data that elucidate the role of the episodic buffer in language processing. We argue that the episodic buffer seems to be truly multimodal in function and that while formation of unitary multidimensional representations in the episodic buffer seems to engage posterior neural networks, maintenance of such representations is supported by frontal networks. Although, the episodic buffer is not necessarily supported by executive processes and seems to be supported by different neural networks, it may operate in tandem with the central executive during effortful language processing. There is also evidence to suggest engagement of the phonological loop during buffer processing. The hippocampus seems to play a role in formation but not maintenance of representations in the episodic buffer of working memory.

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“…There is also behavioural evidence in human subjects that suggests that visual and auditory spatial information is maintained in a unitary storage (Lehnert and Zimmer 2006). In neuroimaging studies, both supramodal (Martinkauppi et al 2000;Ricciardi et al 2006) and modality-specific frontal and parietal networks have been shown to be recruited by spatial processing of visual and auditory or visual and tactile information.…”

Section: Domain-specificity In Spatial and Nonspatial Auditory Wmmentioning

confidence: 98%

Domain-dependent activation during spatial and nonspatial auditory working memory

Rama

2007

Cogn Process

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Visual system has been proposed to be divided into two, the ventral and dorsal, processing streams. The ventral pathway is thought to be involved in object identification whereas the dorsal pathway processes information regarding the spatial locations of objects and the spatial relationships among objects. Several studies on working memory (WM) processing have further suggested that there is a dissociable domain-dependent functional organization within the prefrontal cortex for processing of spatial and nonspatial visual information. Also the auditory system is proposed to be organized into two domain-specific processing streams, similar to that seen in the visual system. Recent studies on auditory WM have further suggested that maintenance of nonspatial and spatial auditory information activates a distributed neural network including temporal, parietal, and frontal regions but the magnitude of activation within these activated areas shows a different functional topography depending on the type of information being maintained. The dorsal prefrontal cortex, specifically an area of the superior frontal sulcus (SFS), has been shown to exhibit greater activity for spatial than for nonspatial auditory tasks. Conversely, ventral frontal regions have been shown to be more recruited by nonspatial than by spatial auditory tasks. It has also been shown that the magnitude of this dissociation is dependent on the cognitive operations required during WM processing. Moreover, there is evidence that within the nonspatial domain in the ventral prefrontal cortex, there is an across-modality dissociation during maintenance of visual and auditory information. Taken together, human neuroimaging results on both visual and auditory sensory systems support the idea that the prefrontal cortex is organized according to the type of information being maintained in WM.

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Auditory and visual spatial working memory

Cited by 37 publications

References 55 publications

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

The role of the episodic buffer in working memory for language processing

Domain-dependent activation during spatial and nonspatial auditory working memory

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