The Roles of the Central Executive and Visuospatial Storage in Mental Arithmetic: A Comparison across Strategies

Previous research has demonstrated that working memory plays an important role in arithmetic. Different arithmetical strategies rely on working memory to different extents—for example, verbal working memory has been found to be more important for procedural strategies, such as counting and decomposition, than for retrieval strategies. Surprisingly, given the close connection between spatial and mathematical skills, the role of visuospatial working memory has received less attention and is poorly understood. This study used a dual-task methodology to investigate the impact of a dynamic spatial n-back task (Experiment 1) and tasks loading the visuospatial sketchpad and central executive (Experiment 2) on adults’ use of counting, decomposition, and direct retrieval strategies for addition. While Experiment 1 suggested that visuospatial working memory plays an important role in arithmetic, especially when counting, the results of Experiment 2 suggested this was primarily due to the domain-general executive demands of the n-back task. Taken together, these results suggest that maintaining visuospatial information in mind is required when adults solve addition arithmetic problems by any strategy but the role of domain-general executive resources is much greater than that of the visuospatial sketchpad.