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 de spite the fact that response times did not differ. We investigated whe ther the topographical dissociation will become apparent in a behaviou ral dissociation if subjects repeatedly have to switch between the ret rieval task and one of two tasks which differ in the amount of load th ey 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 th e 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 switc hing task, whereas the reverse pattern was found with gender classific ation. The results support the assumption of localized neural networks specialized for distinct aspects of information processing.