Multimodal coding and strategic approach in young and older adults’ visual working memory performance

Abstract

Visual working memory (WM) was investigated in young (18-35 yrs) and older (63-88 yrs) adults by assessing use of visual and verbal processing, and strategic approach. Experiment 1 comprised a visual interference paradigm, to investigate visual rehearsal during an abstract visual WM task. Results suggested both groups used a visual strategy, but older adults struggled more when visual interference was administered first, perhaps due to difficulty developing non-visual strategies. In Experiment 2, a more meaningful task version was additionally administered, offering greater opportunity for multimodal coding. Despite the marked effect of age, both groups benefited from semantic availability to the same extent. Young adults reported a verbal strategy more than older adults, who reported less verbal labelling and more visual refreshing, and a less efficient approach overall. The results highlight age-related limitations in visual WM capacity and strategy use, but show potential for compensation, and a role for task practice.

Strategic prioritisation enhances young and older adults’ visual feature binding in working memory

“…This has been found for a variety of visual stimuli such as black and white matrix patterns, and basic colours, shapes, or orientations (e.g. Beigneux, Plaie, & Isingrini, 2007;Brockmole & Logie, 2013;Brown, Niven, Logie, Rhodes, & Allen, 2017;Hamilton, Brown, & Rossi-Arnaud, 2018;Logie & Maylor, 2009;Nicholls & English, 2020;Peich, Husain, & Bays, 2013). Furthermore, older adults have a reduced ability to retain both individual visual features in working memory (such as colours or shapes), as well as their associations ('bindings';Allen, Brown, & Niven, 2013;Brown & Brockmole, 2010;Brown, et al, 2017;Brockmole, Parra, Della Sala, & Logie, 2008;Chen & Naveh-Benjamin, 2012;Guazzo, Allen, Baddeley, & Della Sala, 2020;Peich et al, 2013;Peterson & Naveh-Benjamin, 2016, 2017Read, Rogers, & Wilson, 2016;Rhodes, Parra, Cowan, & Logie, 2017;Rhodes, Parra, & Logie, 2016).…”

Charting the Diversity of Strategic Processes in Visuospatial Short-Term Memory

“…This may be in part because it is strikingly clear that visual and verbal-recoding strategies involve different mechanisms, in part because it fits well with common conceptions of working memory as constituted of separate verbal and visuospatial store systems (e.g., Logie, 2011), and in part because several important works have been devoted to the interplay between the two strategies, including the progressive emergence of verbal recoding throughout development (Hitch, Halliday, Dodd, & Littler, 1989; Hitch, Halliday, Schaafstal, & Schraagen, 1988; Pickering, 2001). Critically, however, this does not imply that strategy use is restricted to these two possibilities (see, e.g., Brown Nicholls & English, 2020).…”

“…A cursory reading of the literature may convey the impression that visuospatial STM tasks (or visuospatial working memory tasks; the two are considered together here) can be solved only through either a purely visual strategy or a verbal-recoding strategy. Indeed, many researchers have mostly focused their discussion of visuospatial strategy use on the distinction between visuospatial encoding and verbal recoding (e.g., Brown Nicholls & English, 2020; J. Pearson & Keogh, 2019).…”

“…The handful of studies that have collected explicit self-reports of strategy use in visuospatial STM tasks provide a first look into the diversity of strategic behavior (Brown Nicholls & English, 2020; Kirchhoff & Buckner, 2006; Magen & Berger-Mandelbaum, 2018; Patt et al, 2014; Ridgeway, 2006; Smith, Ritzhaupt, & Tjoe, 2010; Strasser et al, 2010). These studies have identified as many as 10 different strategies for visuospatial STM (Kirchhoff & Buckner, 2006).…”

“…Pearson and Keogh (2019) proposed that inconsistencies in the literature could be resolved by considering that the nature of a visuospatial STM task fundamentally changes as a function of the strategies used to solve it. Likewise, Brown Nicholls and English (2020) concluded that older subjects differed from younger subjects in their patterns of visuospatial STM strategy use, potentially contributing to age-related decline in performance. Both studies pointed to strategy use as a key factor in understanding visuospatial memory performance, stressing the need for a closer examination of visuospatial strategies.…”