Information Transformation Among Different Parts Of Working Memory

Working memory as a temporary processing and storing information and limited energy system is necessary during many cognitive processing procedures.Phonological loop,a component of working memory,is primarily responsible for voice-based information processing and storage,processing mainly textual information,and visuospatial sketchpad is mainly responsible for the visual and spatial information processing and storage,main processing the information of picture and spatial movement.In everyday life,people often learn pictures and texts,and convert between the two types.During studying pictures and texts,how do the two components of working memory,phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad work? How does the course of information transformation between the two types of information achieve? At present,these two issues are not understood in a unified way.In this study,twenty-two subjects participated in a 3×2×2 complete within-subject design.The independent variables are types of learning materials(pictures,visual words,auditory words),interference(without interference, interference,in which the condition of interference is that when pictures were learned,the subjects' phonological loops were interfered;when subjects were learning words,their visuospatial sketchpads were interfered),and matching consistency(the types of learning materials and the types of matching materials are same and different).The results suggested that (1) during studying pictures and words of describing space and location information, phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad were both be activated;(2) when pictures were learned,there was a significant loss between different types of stimuli.This finding was consistent with the distinctiveness account.When studying the words of describing the relationship of space and location,the conversion of information was found.Interfering with phonological loop or visuospatial sketchpad didn't influence the conversion of information.So we speculated that the conversion of information was achieved by the episodic buffer,a component of working memory;(3) the order of studying and the order of matching responses had a high degree of similarity.At the same time,the difficulties of tasks influenced the degree of similarity of the order of studying and the order of matching responses.