The domain-specific and domain-general relationships of visuospatial working memory to reasoning ability

Zach Shipstead, Jade Yonehiro

The degree to which visuospatial working memory (VSWM) is separable from working memory in general is an open question. On one hand, the construct is often researched as a unitary, domain-specific system. On the other, there is evidence that VWSM shares a common processing component with verbal memory. One might interpret this shared component as domain-general attention. We used confirmatory factor analysis to demonstrate that VSWM shares a domain-general component with verbal memory tasks and has a domain-specific component that is independent of verbal memory. Furthermore, the domain-general component was found to correlate with reasoning ability in both the visuospatial and verbal domains. The domain-specific component only correlated with reasoning ability when the tests had a strong visuospatial component. We argue that theories of VSWM need to place greater emphasis on its multiply determined nature.