Division of the articulatory loop according to sensory modality using double dissociation
Résumé
According to Wilson and Fox (2007), working memory for gestures has the same characteristics as the phonological loop. The purpose of our research was to determine whether there is a common articulatory loop for verbal and gestural learning. We carried out two double dissociation experiments. The first involved 84 participants who had to reproduce a series of three gestures under three conditions: control, gestural interference (repeated gestures) and verbal interference (repeated “blah blah”). A significant difference in performance was observed; gestural interference resulted in the weakest performance, while there was no difference between the verbal interference condition and the control group. The second experiment, with 30 participants, involved the memorisation of letters and digits; performance was significantly affected by verbal interference but there was no difference between the gestural interference condition and the control group. The consequences of the dissociations are discussed in relation to Baddeley's (2000) model.