Although visual and auditory inputs are initially processed in separate perception systems, studies have built on the idea that to maintain spatial information these modalities share a component of working memory. The present study used working memory navigation tasks to examine functional similarities and dissimilarities in the performance of updating tasks. Participants mentally updated the spatial location of a target in a virtual array in response to sequential pictorial and sonant directional cues before identifying the target’s final location. We predicted that if working memory representations are modality-specific, mixed-modality cues would demonstrate a cost of modality switching relative to unimodal cues. The results indicate that updating performance using visual unimodal cues positively correlated with that using auditory unimodal cues. Task performance using unimodal cues was comparable to that using mixed modality cues. The results of a subsequent experiment involving updating of target traces were consistent with those of the preceding experiments and support the view of modality-nonspecific memory.

虽然视觉和听觉输入最初是在单独的感知系统中处理的，但研究建立在这样一种想法的基础上，即为了维护空间信息，这些模式共享工作记忆的一个组成部分。本研究使用工作记忆导航任务来检查更新任务性能的功能相似性和不同之处。参与者在确定目标的最终位置之前，根据顺序图形和声音方向提示，在心理上更新虚拟阵列中目标的空间位置。我们预测，如果工作记忆表征是特定于模态的，混合模态线索将证明相对于单模态线索的模态转换成本。结果表明，使用视觉单峰线索更新表现与使用听觉单峰线索的表现正相关。使用单模态线索的任务表现与使用混合模态线索的任务表现相当。随后涉及更新目标痕迹的实验结果与之前的实验结果一致，支持模态非特异性记忆的观点。