Path Configuration Complexity Affects Spatial Memory Span on the eCorsi Task but Does Not Influence Performance of a Concurrent Auditory Discrimination Task
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Visuospatial working memory is often assessed using the Corsi block-tapping task where set size is used to estimate capacity. It is well established that characteristics of the Corsi task path configuration such as length, crossings, and angles influence recall accuracy suggesting that more complex path configurations increase the load on working memory. However, the interaction between set size and path configuration is not well understood. Here we used a secondary auditory task to probe if set size and path configuration impose a similar type of load on the system. Nineteen participants (age = 25.3 ± 3.9 years) performed a computerized version of the Corsi test either alone (single) or simultaneously with an auditory tone discrimination task (dual). The eCorsi task involved a set of simple (no crosses, shorter lengths, larger angles) or complex (>2 crosses, longer lengths, smaller angles) paths at set sizes of five to eight blocks. Results showed significantly lower recall accuracy for the complex compared to the simple paths (63.32% vs. 86.38%, p < 0.001) at all set sizes, regardless of task condition (single, dual). Auditory performance (accuracy and response time) was significantly lower in the dual compared to single task (85.34% vs. 99.67%, p < 0.001), but performance was not affected by the complexity of the eCorsi path configuration. These findings suggest that set size and path complexity impose a different type of load on the working memory system and may rely on different resources.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it