Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The n-back task is one of the most popular methods forstudying working memory, and it is tested witheither auditory or visual stimuli. Previous researchcomparing stimulus modalities has demonstrated that auditoryand visual tasks often elicit differential responding and,potentially, different underlying cognitive processes. In thisstudy, performance accuracy and response time weremeasured during an n-back task that varied in termsof stimulus modality and difficulty. Findings demonstrate thatparticipants respond faster but less accurately during a visualas compared to an auditory condition where participants aremore accurate but slower to respond. These results arediscussed in terms of dual coding and feature binding.Implications for the presentation of n-back tasks in studies ofworking memory are discussed.