A study was conducted on the involvement of visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in intuitive geometry
and in school performance in geometry at secondary school. A total of 166 pupils were administered: (1) six
VSWM tasks, comprising simple storage and complex span tasks; and (2) the intuitive geometry task devised
by Dehaene, Izard, Pica, and Spelke (2006), which distinguishes between core, presumably innate, and
culturally-mediated principles of geometry; and (3) a task measuring academic achievement in geometry.
Path analysis models showed that some VSWM components support culturally-mediated principles of geometry,
whereas no VSWM component is related to the core principles of geometry. A complex VSWM task requiring
the manipulation of visual information as well as core and culturally-mediated principles of geometry
directly predicted academic achievement in geometry. Our results are discussed in terms of the role of VSWM
in learning geometry.