Biomedical subjects

Paul W Foos

Publications and source records attributed to Paul W Foos.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Presentation format effects in working memory: the role of attention.

Four experiments are reported in which participants attempted to remember three or six concrete nouns, presented as pictures, spoken words, or printed words, while also verifying the accuracy of sentences. Hypotheses meant to explain the higher recall of pictures and spoken words over printed words were tested. Increasing the difficulty and changing the type of processing task from arithmetic to a visual/spatial reasoning task did not influence recall. An examination of long-term modality effects showed that those effects were not sufficient to explain the superior performance with spoken words and pictures. Only when we manipulated the allocation of attention to the items in the storage task by requiring the participants to articulate the items and by presenting the stimulus items under a degraded condition were we able to reduce or remove the effect of presentation format. The findings suggest that the better recall of pictures and spoken words over printed words result from the fact that under normal presentation conditions, printed words receive less processing attention than pictures and spoken words do.

Attention↗

PubMed2005

Bimodal format effects in working memory.

This work combines presentation formats to test whether bimodal conditions offer advantages or disadvantages relative to single formats in working memory performance. A dual task that included recall of 3 or 6 items while verifying the accuracy of math sentences was used in 2 experiments. When comparisons were made between single- and dual-format conditions, there was an advantage for items presented as spoken words and pictures simultaneously and individually. In Experiment 2, dual-format conditions had incongruent information, and spoken words were found to interfere with recall of long sequences of pictures and printed words. The findings suggest that when dual-format items are the same, there are some performance advantages when spoken words are combined with pictures or printed words. When the dual formats are displaying different items, however, spoken words are a more powerful distractor than pictures or printed words, and verbal and visual short-term stores can demonstrate similar susceptibility to distractor interference.

Attention↗

PubMed2002

Presentation format and its effect on working memory.

In three experiments, we examined the separate cognitive demands of processing and storage in working memory and looked at how effective the coordination was when items for storage varied in format/modality. A sentence verification task involving arithmetic facts was combined with a span task involving two to six items presented in picture, printed word, or spoken word format. The first two experiments were the same, except for the added requirement of articulation of the math sentence in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 varied the length of the span item and compared recall with recognition performance. The results showed that both spoken words and picture produced superior recall and recognition, as compared with printed words, and are consistent with Baddeley and Logie's (1999) and Mayer's (2001) models of working memory. Also, the differences in processing performance across spans varied with the difficulty of the task but showed the strongest support for the resource allocation model (Foos 1995).

Cognition↗