Abstract
ABSTRACTWe investigated whether finger pointing toward picture locations can be used as an external cognitive control tool to guide attention and compensate for the immature cognitive control functions in children compared with young adults. Item and source memory performance was compared for picture‐location pairs that were either semantically congruent (e.g., a cloud presented at the upper half of the screen) or incongruent (e.g., a cloud presented at the lower part of the screen). Contrary to our expectations, pointing had an adverse effect on source memory compared to visual observation only, in both age groups. As expected, superior source memory performance was found for congruent compared to incongruent picture‐locations pairs in both age groups. These findings suggest that pointing toward pictures compared to only viewing may hamper memory, and that congruent picture locations are easier to remember than incongruent ones.
Highlights
We investigated whether finger pointing toward picture locations can be used as an external cognitive control tool to guide attention and compensate for the immature cognitive control functions in children compared with young adults
Item and source memory performance was compared for picture-location pairs that were either semantically congruent or incongruent
All participants in the pointing condition pointed at all pictures correctly during encoding
Summary
We investigated whether finger pointing toward picture locations can be used as an external cognitive control tool to guide attention and compensate for the immature cognitive control functions in children compared with young adults. According to the theory of grounded cognition, perceptual and physical interaction with the world shapes cognition, including memory (for a review, see Barsalou, 2008) These interactions and mental simulations of these interactions are multimodal; apart from the visual modality, they contain relevant motor and mental states that were part of the original experience (Dijkstra & Zwaan, 2015). Feyereisen (2009) showed superior source memory for congruent (e.g., put money in the wallet) and incongruent action–object associations (e.g., put candy in the wallet) when the action phrases were enacted compared to only verbalized This led us to our idea that the act of pointing toward picture locations might enhance source memory for semantically congruent and incongruent picture locations
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