Person-based organisation in working memory

Abstract

Working memory (WM) helps maintain information during a variety of cognitive activities in scholastic and social situations. This study focused on a social aspect of WM, specifically, how it maintains information related to people. We investigated person-based organisation of information across four experiments using the reading span task (RST). Person information (i.e., an occupational title) was provided with sentences manipulated across conditions. In Experiment 1, consistent with the assumption that person-based organisation exists in WM, participants performed better when they could easily organise target items in a person-based manner (person-based organisation) than when they were prevented from using such information. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the process of person-based organisation using alphabetical letters as targets (unlike words in Experiment 1), which prevented possible semantic associations between person information and target items. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, suggesting that contextual retrieval is critical in person-based organisation. Experiment 3 showed the person-based organisation effect even after controlling for the difficulty of the process component in the RST. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 suggest that person information could serve as contextual retrieval cues in WM. Experiment 4, which did not show the organisation effect based on information about an object (i.e., a fruit name), suggests along with Experiments 1 to 3 that the observed organisation effect in Experiments 1 to 3 was specific to person information. In addition to showing the enhanced WM performance by person-based organisation, we have suggested contextual cue-dependent retrieval as the underlying cognitive process.