Quinn and McConnel
Quinn and McConnel (1996)
- asked participants to learn a list of words by using either imagery or rehearsal.
- The task was performed on its own or in the presence of a concurrent visual noise (changing patterns of dots) or a concurrent verbal noise (speech in a foreign language).
- The results showed that learning words by imagery was not affected by a concurrent verbal task but it was disturbed by a concurrent visual task.
- The opposite was found in the rehearsal condition.
- This indicates that imagery processing uses the visuo-spatial sketchpad whereas verbal processing uses the phonological loop.
- If two tasks used the same component, performance deteriorated.
· The study thus lends support to different modality-specific slave systems and the idea of limited processing capacity.
