The Role Of The Phonological Loop, The Visuo-spatial Sketch Pad In The Comparison Of The Same Base Powers

The working memory is a important memory system. The study about working memory is a vital field of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology now. Overseas and domestic scholars have had researched a lot about working memory and arithmetic cognition. But the relation between working memory and algebraic cognition was researched rarely. This study was to explore the role of the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketch pad in the comparison of the same base powers.There are two experiments in which the dual-task methodology was used. In the experiments 1, subjects were asked to finish algebraic verification task under three conditions which were primary task with no secondary tasks (control condition), concurrent word memory tasks (words remembering conditions), and concurrent visuo-spatial memory tasks (visuo-spatial remembering conditions). The purposes of experiment 1 was designed to explore the role of the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch pad in the comparison of the same-base powers by using dual-task paradigm. The results showed that word memory tasks and visuo-spatial memory tasks significantly disrupted the main tasks, and these disruption effects increased while the distance between base and 1, or between the two indexes decreased.In the experiments 2, subjects were asked to finish algebraic verification task under three conditions which were primary task with concurrent visual memory tasks (visual remembering conditions), and concurrent spatial memory tasks (spatial remembering conditions). The purpose of experiment 2 was exploring the role of visual memory and spatial memory, the change of the visual and spatial memory's role with the change of distance between numbers. The results suggested that there was significant difference between the visual memory tasks' disruption effect and the spatial memory tasks', and their disruption effects changed as the changing of the distance between base and 1, or the difference between two indexes. We suggested that the visual memory and spatial memory be involved in the comparison of same base powers, and their load increased while the distance between base and 1, or between two indexes decreased. There were differences between the roles of visual memory and spatial memory in the comparison of same base powers.