Eye-movements reveal the serial position of the attended item in verbal working memory

The problem of how the mind can retain sequentially organized information has a long research tradition that remains unresolved. While various computational models propose a mechanism of binding serial order information to position markers, the representational nature and processes that operate on these position markers are not clear. Recent behavioral work suggests that space is used to mark positions in serial order and that this process is governed by spatial attention. Based on the assumption that brain areas controlling spatial attention are also involved in saccadic planning, we continuously tracked the eye-movements as a direct measure of the spatial attention during retrieval from a verbal WM sequence. Participants memorized a sequence of auditory numbers. During retention, they heard a number-cue that did or did not belong to the memorized set. After this number-cue, a target-beep could be presented to which they had to respond if the number-cue belonged to the memorized sequence. In Experiment 1, the target-beep was either presented to the left or right ear, and in Experiment 2 bilaterally (removing any spatial aspect). We tested the hypothesis that systematic eye-movements are made when people retrieve items of sequences of auditory words and found that the retrieval of begin items resulted in leftward eye-movements and the retrieval of end items in rightward eye-movements. These observations indicate that the oculomotor system is also involved in the serial order processes in verbal WM thereby providing a promising novel approach to get insight into abstract cognitive processes.