The Independent Processing and Storage Mechanisms of Visual and Vibrotactile Working Memory

The information in working memory (WM) is stored in a domain-independent system or domain-specific storage and the storage and processing of cross-modal WM are still under intense debate. This study investigates the mechanism of cross-modal processing and storage of visual and vibrotactile WM using the delayed match-to-sample paradigm, the dual-task paradigm, and the selective interference paradigm. We hypothesized that WM can independently process and store the cross-modal information of vision and haptics, and proposed the domain-specific WM stores. The results suggest that the WM can parallel and sequentially process cross-modal information of vision and haptics and that the storage of visual and tactile WM may be domain-specific. This study provides preliminary evidence for the dissociated relationship between tactile sketchpads and visuospatial sketchpads, thus contributing to the WM storage and processing of information from different modalities and contents, and increasing the cognitive processing bandwidth of WM.