Improving visual spatial working memory in younger and older adults: effects of cross-modal cues

ABSTRACT

Spatially informative auditory and vibrotactile (cross-modal) cues can facilitate attention but little is known about how similar cues influence visual spatial working memory (WM) across the adult lifespan. We investigated the effects of cues (spatially informative or alerting pre-cues vs. no cues), cue modality (auditory vs. vibrotactile vs. visual), memory array size (four vs. six items), and maintenance delay (900 vs. 1800 ms) on visual spatial location WM recognition accuracy in younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA). We observed a significant interaction between spatially informative pre-cue type, array size, and delay. OA and YA benefitted equally from spatially informative pre-cues, suggesting that attentional orienting prior to WM encoding, regardless of cue modality, is preserved with age.  Contrary to predictions, alerting pre-cues generally impaired performance in both age groups, suggesting that maintaining a vigilant state of arousal by facilitating the alerting attention system does not help visual spatial location WM.

KEYWORDS:

• Vibrotactile cues
• auditory cues
• spatial working memory
• cognitive aging
• cross-modal cues

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Due to the uninformative nature of the centrally presented alerting cue, participants are likely to ignore it if it is presented in a high proportion of trials (Robertson, Mattingley, Rorden, & Driver, 1998). Therefore, in order for participants to effectively use the cue, a cued percentage of 25% of trials is often used (Luca & Murtha, 2009; McLaughlin & Murtha, 2010).

2. We conducted a Pearson product moment correlation to investigate the relationship between anxiety and education with our dependent variable across all conditions. There was negligible impact. Education did not correlate with any levels of our outcome variable (p > .05), and anxiety only significantly correlated (p < .05) with 1 level of all experimental conditions. As a result, we chose to report the analysis without covarying out the impact of either of these two factors.

3. Note, we tested the effects of time of day by entering this factor as a between-subjects variable and rerunning our ANOVA. Time of day did not moderate any main effect or interactions (p > .05), and thus is not discussed further.

4. We also conducted an ANOVA with time of day as a between-subjects variable. The analysis revealed that time of day did not moderate any main effects or interactions (p > .05) and thus is not discussed further.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an internal grant from York University, Faculty of Health (S. Murtha). Aspects of this study were presented at the 2016 Cognitive Aging Conference in Atlanta, GA (April, 2016)