Motor fluency makes it possible to integrate the components of the trace in memory and facilitates its re-construction.

Abstract

The aim of this work was to test the hypothesis that motor fluency should help the integration of the components of the trace and therefore its re-construction. In the encoding phase of each of the three experiments we conducted, a word to be remembered appeared colored in blue or purple. Participants had to read these words aloud and, at the same time, execute a gesture in their ipsilateral (fluent gesture) or contralateral space (non-fluent gesture), according to the color of the word. The aim of the first experiment was to show that the words associated with a fluent gesture during the encoding phase were more easily recognized than those associated with a non-fluent gesture. The results obtained supported the hypothesis. In the second experiment, our objective was to show that the fluency of a gesture performed during encoding in order to associate a word with a color can facilitate the integration of the word with its color. Here again, the results obtained supported the hypothesis. While in Experiment 2 we tested the effect of motor fluency during encoding on word-color integration, the objective of Experiment 3 was to show that motor fluency was integrated in the word-color trace and contributed to the re-construction of the trace. The results obtained supported the hypothesis. Taken together, these findings lead us to believe that traces are not only traces of the processes that gave rise to them, but also traces of the way in which the processes took place.