Paired-associate learning in spatial and verbal information modality differences

The ability of the human mind to create, modify, and suppress associations (so-called cue-target-chunks) between previously unrelated items is a fundamental cognitive function. We reanalyzed and extended a classical paired-associate learning (PAL) paradigm from Anderson (2007) by investigating how modality differences (verbal-numerical vs. spatial-numerical) influence cognitive processing. We adopted a sequential interference paradigm with a within-subject design where position-word-numbers (PAL-PWN) follows position-numbers (PAL-PN), using the same position-number pairings. Data from 16 participants (4,440 trials) were analyzed. Results indicate that PAL-PN was the harder task overall but the learning trajectory for those who do succeed was comparable to PAL-PWN. Specifically, PAL-PN shows a learning trajectory while PAL-PWN shows a floor-compressed accuracy range. A spatial/number confusion error analysis reveals that the errors were spatially structured. Implications for the mechanisms of updating learned associations of different modality information are discussed.