PSYCO258 Lecture 9: 9
13 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
The visuospatial sketch pad is a slave component of the working memory system that processes visually and spatially-based information. Visual imagery: the creation of visual images in the mind in the absence of a physical visual stimulus. One line of evidence supporting the visuospatial sketch pad comes from the mental rotation task (shepard & metzler, 1971) Participants must determine whether two shapes, presented at different rotations, are the same or different. Trials that involved a greater rotational difference between shapes (e. g. 90 vs 30 degrees) were responded to more slowly. Suggests participants were using visual imagery to simulate mentally rotating. The central executive is a master component which acts as an attention controller in the working memory system: controls the wm slave components, controls suppression of irrelevant information focus, divide, switch attention. The ce may be associated with perseveration in some contexts (repeatedly performing the same action or thought even if it is not achieving the desired goal)
