Modulation of working memory updating: Does long-term memory lexical association matter?
The aim of the present study was to investigate how working memory updating for verbal material is modulated by enduring properties of long-term memory. Two coexisting perspectives that account for the relation between long-term representation and short-term performance were addressed. First, evidence suggests that performance is more closely linked to lexical properties, that is, co-occurrences within the language. Conversely, other evidence suggests that performance is linked more to long-term representations which do not entail lexical/linguistic representations. Our aim was to investigate how these two kinds of long-term memory associations (i.e., lexical or nonlexical) modulate ongoing working memory activity. Therefore, we manipulated (between participants) the strength of the association in letters based on either frequency of co-occurrences (lexical) or contiguity along the sequence of the alphabet (nonlexical). Results showed a cost in working memory updating for strongly lexically associated stimuli only. Our findings advance knowledge of how lexical long-term memory associations between consonants affect working memory updating and, in turn, contribute to the study of factors which impact the updating process across memory systems.
Brain Behavioral Science Department, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 11, 27100, Pavia, Italy. caterina.artuso@unipv.it.
Caterina
C
Artuso
Brain Behavioral Science Department, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 11, 27100, Pavia, Italy.
Paola
P
Palladino
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D008297:Male; D057567:Memory, Long-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
Lexical representation; Long-term memory; Short-term memory; Verbal working memory; Working memory updating