Working-memory and auditory localization: Demand for central resources impairs performance

Auditory and visual spatial working memory

“…If it is reoriented in space (e.g., to the location of the auditory signal of the secondary task), the shift disrupts the maintenance process. Among others, Merat and Groeger (2003;Merat, Groeger, & Withington, 1999), who also reported interference between auditory spatial perception and visual spatial working memory, did not restrict interference to spatial attention, but assumed the common demand on general attentional resources to be causative (see also Klauer & Stegmaier, 1997). This approach, however, leaves open the question of how auditory spatial information is maintained.…”

The relation between working memory capacity and auditory lateralization in children with auditory processing disorders

“…We could find only one published study about WM and auditory lateralization that suggested the role of central executive in auditory localization [29]. They showed that the decrement in lateralization performance is clearly due to an increase in requirements for central processing resources, rather than demands placed on the phonological loop or visual spatial sketch.…”

Serial Memory for Sound-Specified Locations: Effects of Spatial Uncertainty and Motor Suppression

“…Smyth & Pendleton, 1990;Smyth & Scholey, 1996;Merat & Groeger, 2003;Klauer & Zhao, 2004). Most previous studies have attempted to study spatial working memory by having participants look at some visual pattern and then subsequently make spatial judgements.…”

“…We considered that the accuracy of recall should be affected by two factors. Reduction in performance might be expected by reducing the separation between loudspeakers (see Merat & Groeger, 2003). In addition, because this study increased the number of locations from which sound could be presented, if the serial recall task relies not only on temporal, but also spatial information, we predicted that even in the discrete response condition the tendency to make adjacent temporal errors should be reduced.…”

“…However Parmentier and Jones"s findings are also surprising in light of empirical findings which show that localisation is compromised when performed in combination with typical working memory tasks. For example, Merat and Groeger (2003) show that sound localisation is less accurate when performed in the interval between encoding and retrieval of positional information. Also, tasks such as super-span serial recall of digits and paced visual serial addition (PVSAT) reduce sound localisation performance, while concurrent articulation or reading aloud visually presented digits does not (Merat, Groeger & Withington, 1999).…”