The impact of irrelevant spatial language semantics on the recognition of locations in visuospatial working memory

Numerous studies have demonstrated that an exogenous distractor, whether visual or auditory, exerts an impact on the maintenance of visual location in working memory (Smith & Scholey, 1994; Stigchel et al., 2007). This indicates that attention can be viewed as a mechanism supporting the rehearsal in visuospatial working memory. Another line of research has shown that words conveying spatial meaning reflexively direct attention to the corresponding location (Hommel et al., 2001; Dudschig et al., 2012). Consequently, the data suggest a potential sharing of mental resources between the maintenance of visual location and the processing of spatial words. Building on this evidence, we asked whether task-irrelevant word meaning would influence the recognition of a visual location in working memory. In a series of four experiments, participants remembered a dot and, in a recognition test, decided whether a subsequently presented dot was in the same position as the previous dot or not. The word as a distractor appeared during the retention interval, presented visually in the center of the screen (Experiments 1, 2) or auditorily (Experiments 3, 4). The stimuli included words explicitly indicating direction ('above' and 'below' in Experiments 1 and 3) or implicitly suggesting direction ('sun' or 'grass' in Experiments 2 and 4). Also, we used control words that did not imply direction towards a specific visual field (e.g., ‘today’ or ‘bier’). Remarkably, the results showed consistent word effects across all experiments, except in the last experiment (auditory, implicit words) where words only influenced location memory in the match condition. The findings indicate that spatial information from linguistic stimuli significantly influences location recognition, establishing a close link between attention, working memory, and language processing.