What is the Brooks task and what did it indicate about the Central Executive?

• A. A task where participants recall simple digits while ignoring distractions.
• B. An experiment where participants memorize a sentence and respond to prompts with either pointing on a map (spatial) or verbal answers, suggesting different resources for different response modalities and highlighting CE coordination.
• C. A task used to measure long-term memory encoding.
• D. A purely motor coordination task.

Answer: (B)

The Brooks task shows how the Central Executive coordinates between different memory subsystems when responses require different kinds of actions. In this setup, people memorize a sentence (verbal information) and then respond to prompts either by speaking or by pointing to a location on a map (a spatial response). The pattern of performance reveals that verbal and spatial information rely on distinct resource systems, and the Central Executive must manage which system gets used for a given response. This demonstrates that the CE is a control process that coordinates multiple, modality-specific stores rather than a single, undifferentiated resource. The other options describe tasks unrelated to this coordination of verbal and spatial resources, so they don’t fit.