Selective Interference During the Retrieval of Spatial and Verbal Information from Episodic Long-term Memory

Recent studies have shown that the retrieval of spatial versus verbal information is dissociated by the topography of cortical activation despite the fact that response times did not differ. We investigated whether the topographical dissociation will become apparent in a behavioural dissociation if subjects repeatedly have to switch between the retrieval task and one of two tasks which differ in the amount of load they put on the respective representational system. Therefore, retrieval of both spatial and verbal information was combined with no switching task, a mental rotation task, and a gender classification task. In the no-switching condition response times were identical for spatial and verbal information. In contrast, a more pronounced difficulty effect for spatial information was observed with mental rotation as the switching task, whereas the reverse pattern was found with gender classification. The results support the assumption of localized neural networks specialized for distinct aspects of information processing.