Abstract
The present study examines the potential impact of a mnemonic acronym on the learning, the execution, the resilience toward interruptions, and the mental representation of an eight-step procedural task with sequential constraints. 65 participants were required to learn a sequential task, including eight different steps which had to be carried out in a predefined sequence. 33 participants were provided with the acronym “WORTKLAU” as a mnemonic to support the learning and execution of the task and the other 32 participants had to learn and execute the task without such support. Each letter of the acronym coded one step of the task, involving a binary decision about a certain property of the complex stimulus. In 60 out of 72 trials of the task, participants were interrupted between different steps, and had to perform a 2-back interruption task for 6 or 30 s, after which they had to resume the procedural task as quickly as possible at the correct step. Learning times, performance in uninterrupted trials, and post-interruption performance measures were analyzed. Results of Experiment 1 suggest that the mnemonic acronym enhanced learning of the task sequence, and provide some evidence for a hierarchical mental representation of the task, resulting in faster resumption times at certain steps of the procedure after an interruption. In Experiment 2 the internal structure of the acronym was even emphasized by a hyphen at the borders of the two words included in the acronym (WORT-KLAU). This improved the resilience toward interruptions at the border step of the procedure significantly. Our results provide evidence for beneficial effects of mnemonic acronym particularly for the learning of a sequential procedural task. In addition, they suggest that the structure of mnemonic acronym directly impacts the mental representation of a task. Finally, they show that mnemonic acronyms could be used to improve the resilience toward detrimental effect of interruptions, at least at certain task steps of a procedural task.
Highlights
Accomplishing a complex task in everyday life or professional settings often requires to remember how to conduct a procedure that consists of a sequence of steps, which have to be performed in a predefined order
Based on knowledge gained from research on memory for order (Nelson and Archer, 1972; Morris and Cook, 1978), beneficial effects of the mnemonic acronym were expected to emerge in the time needed to learn the procedure
This suggests that mnemonic acronyms can serve well as learning mnemonics supporting the establishment of declarative knowledge concerning the set and sequence of rules of a sequential task
Summary
Accomplishing a complex task in everyday life or professional settings often requires to remember how to conduct a procedure that consists of a sequence of steps, which have to be performed in a predefined order. Checklists are not always available and there are number of instances where even important and safety-critical procedures have to be performed based on memory only (i.e., so called memory items in aviation, Hunt, 1988; Au, 2005). This provides a number of cognitive challenges similar to order memory and serial recall (e.g., Henson, 1998; Hurlstone et al, 2014), including initial learning of the sequence, retaining the sequence across time, and, most important, retrieving the correct order of steps once the procedure has to be executed. The latter is assumed to involve a so-called placekeeping process, i.e., monitoring the progress within a procedural task by keeping track of completed and to-beexecuted steps (Carlson and Cassenti, 2004; Trafton et al, 2011; Hambrick and Altmann, 2015)
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