Multimodal coding and strategic approach in young and older adults’ visual working memory performance

ABSTRACT

Visual working memory (WM) was investigated in young (18–35 yrs) and older (63–88 yrs) adults by assessing use of visual and verbal processing, and strategic approach. Experiment 1 comprised a visual interference paradigm, to investigate visual rehearsal during an abstract visual WM task. Results suggested both groups used a visual strategy, but older adults struggled more when visual interference was administered first, perhaps due to difficulty developing non-visual strategies. In Experiment 2, a more meaningful task version was additionally administered, offering greater opportunity for multimodal coding. Despite the marked effect of age, both groups benefited from semantic availability to the same extent. Young adults reported a verbal strategy more than older adults, who reported less verbal labeling and more visual refreshing, and a less efficient approach overall. The results highlight age-related limitations in visual WM capacity and strategy use, but show potential for compensation, and a role for task practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual working memory
• strategy
• dual and multimodal coding
• cognitive aging/ageing
• older adults

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

APPENDIX 1

Strategy Questionnaire

1. In this task overall, please rate the extent to which you relied upon a visual and/or verbal strategy to help you remember the checkered patterns. A visual strategy involves concentrating on your mental image of what the pattern looks like. A verbal strategy involves verbalizing the features of the pattern and concentrating on that verbal information.

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2. To what extent did you combine visual and verbal strategies to help remember individual patterns?

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3. To what extent did you “count up” the number of black cells?

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4. To what extent did you attach verbal labels to some of the individual shapes? (e.g., naming a collection of black cells the letter “L”)

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5. To what extent did you focus upon refreshing your mental image of the pattern?

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Notes

1. Note that, when administration order is not included in the analysis, there is only a significant main effect of age group, F(1,42) = 41.13, MSE = 5.95, p < .001, η²_p = .50 (all other p > .40).

2. Note, years of education was missing for one young participant.

3. The effect of task version noted earlier was still significant (p = .024), and there were no significant interactions (all other p > .20).