Relations between working memory, gender, perceptual grouping, and long-term memory in visual search
Abstract: This study examined the relations between explicit and implicit measures of visual-spatial memory (i.e., separate vs. unique memory system hypotheses; cf., e.g., Henke, 2010); whether spatial long-term memory is, as it has been shown at least for spatial short-term memory (i.e., visual imagery, Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) modulated by gender; and how the formation of spatial long-term memory is influenced by perceptual grouping (cf. Geyer, Shi, & Müller, 2010). To examine this, 20 observers (10 female) participated in both a spatial working memory task (sWMT - the original version of mental rotation task developed by Shepard & Metzler (1971) and visual search task (contextual cueing task) , with the latter having shown repeatedly for being aided by spatial long-term memory (sLTM; cf. Chun & Jiang,1998). Results showed that (1) in ‘default’ mode, contextual cueing is modulated by color, rather than, space-based grouping. (2) Contextual cueing is modulated by WM