Vergauwe, E. 1 , Barrouillet, P. 1 & Camos, V. 2
1 Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’Education, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
2 Département de Psychologie, Université de Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
Working memory (WM) is usually defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous processing and storage of information. Up till now, this dual functioning of WM has mainly been studied by assessing the effect of processing demands on recall performance in dual-task situations combining processing and storage. Doing so, it has been shown that recall performance is a direct, linear function of the cognitive load involved in concurrent processing, both in verbal and in visuo-spatial working memory (e.g., Barrouillet et al., 2004, 2007; Vergauwe et al., 2009, 2010). In the present study, we examined the relationship between processing and storage in WM by assessing the effect of memory load on processing performance. Using a pre-load method, verbal storage (series of letters) was combined with verbal processing (parity judgment) in Experiment 1, and visuo-spatial storage (series of locations) was combined with visuo-spatial processing (fit judgment) in Experiment 2. In line with the time-based dual functioning of WM as proposed by the Time-Based Resource-Sharing model, processing performance decreased as a direct, linear function of concurrent memory load in both experiments.