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Mathematics students demonstrate superior visuo-spatial working memory to humanities students under conditions of low central executive processing load
journal contribution
posted on 2018-09-27, 12:54 authored by Paula J. Hubber, Camilla GilmoreCamilla Gilmore, Lucy CraggPrevious research has demonstrated that working memory performance is linked to mathematics achievement. Most previous studies have involved children and arithmetic rather than more advanced forms of mathematics. This study compared the performance of groups of adult mathematics and humanities students. Experiment 1 employed verbal and visuo-spatial working memory span tasks using a novel face-matching processing element. Results showed that mathematics students had greater working memory capacity in the visuospatial domain only. Experiment 2 replicated this and demonstrated that neither visuo-spatial short-term memory nor endogenous spatial attention explained the visuo-spatial working memory differences. Experiment 3 used working memory span tasks with more traditional verbal or visuo-spatial processing elements to explore the effect of processing type. In this study mathematics students showed superior visuo-spatial working memory capacity only when the processing involved had a comparatively low level of central executive involvement. Both visuo-spatial working memory capacity and general visuo-spatial skills predicted mathematics achievement.
Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number RES062-23-3280]. CG is funded by a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematics Education Centre
Published in
Journal of Numerical CognitionVolume
5Issue
2Pages
189 - 219Citation
HUBBER, P.J., GILMORE, C.K. and CRAGG, L., 2019. Mathematics students demonstrate superior visuo-spatial working memory to humanities students under conditions of low central executive processing load. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 5 (2), pp.189-219.Publisher
PsychOpenVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© Hubber; Gilmore; CraggPublisher statement
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Acceptance date
2018-08-29Publication date
2019-08-22Copyright date
2019ISSN
2363-8761Publisher version
Language
- en
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