title: Cross-domain interference costs during concurrent verbal and spatial serial memory tasks are asymmetric.
abstract: Some evidence suggests that memory for serial order is domain-general. Evidence also points to asymmetries in interference between verbal and visual-spatial tasks. We confirm that concurrently remembering verbal and spatial serial lists provokes substantial interference compared with remembering a single list, but we further investigate the impact of this interference throughout the serial position curve, where asymmetries are indeed apparent. A concurrent verbal order memory task affects spatial memory performance throughout the serial positions of the list, but performing a spatial order task affects memory for the verbal serial list only for early list items; in the verbal task only, the final items are unaffected by a concurrent task. Adding suffixes eliminates this asymmetry, resulting in impairment throughout the list for both tasks. These results suggest that domain-general working memory resources may be supplemented with resources specific to the verbal domain, but perhaps not with equivalent spatial resources.
authors.affiliation: Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. c.c.morey@rug.nl
authors.forename: Candice C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Morey
authors.forename: Jonathan T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Mall
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012691:Serial Learning; D013028:Space Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning