WORKING-MEMORY CONSTRAINTS ON LINEAR REASONING WITH SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL CONTENTS

The present article reports two experiments testing the use of working memory components during reasoning with temporal and spatial relation s in four-term series problems. In the first experiment four groups of subjects performed reasoning tasks with temporal and with spatial con tents either without (control) or with a secondary task (articulatory suppression, visuospatial suppression or central executive suppression ). The second experiment tested the secondary task effects in a within -subjects design either on problems with a spatial content or on probl ems with a temporal content, and within each content domain either und er conditions of self-paced or of fixed presentation of the premises. Both experiments found effects of all three secondary tasks on reasoni ng accuracy. This supports the hypothesis that the subjects construct spatial representations of the premise information with the support of visuo-spatial resources of working memory. The second experiment also showed that during premise intake, only visuo-spatial and central exe cutive secondary tasks had an effect. The implications of the data for the working memory requirements of reasoning and for theories of line ar reasoning are discussed.