Psychology Commons^™

Spatial Working Memory For Locations Specified By Vision And Audition: Testing The Amodality Hypothesis, Jack M. Loomis, Roberta L. Klatzky, Brendan Mchugh, Nicholas A. Giudice

Spatial Information Science and Engineering Faculty Scholarship

Spatial working memory can maintain representations from vision, hearing, and touch, representations referred to here as spatial images. The present experiment addressed whether spatial images from vision and hearing that are simultaneously present within working memory retain modality-specific tags or are amodal. Observers were presented with short sequences of targets varying in angular direction, with the targets in a given sequence being all auditory, all visual, or a sequential mixture of the two. On two thirds of the trials, one of the locations was repeated, and observers had to respond as quickly as possible when detecting this repetition. Ancillary detection …