Translating words into actions in working memory: The role of spatial-motoric coding.

Guangzheng Li,Richard J Allen,Graham J Hitch,Alan D Baddeley

doi:10.1177/17470218221079848

Abstract

Research from a working memory perspective on the encoding and temporary maintenance of sequential instructions has established a consistent advantage for enacted over verbal recall. This is thought to reflect action planning for anticipated movements at the response phase. We describe five experiments investigating this, comparing verbal and enacted recall of a series of action–object pairings under different potentially disruptive concurrent task conditions, all requiring repetitive movements. A general advantage for enacted recall was observed across experiments, together with a tendency for concurrent action to impair sequence memory performance. The enacted recall advantage was reduced by concurrent action for both fine and gross concurrent movement with the degree of disruption influenced by both the complexity and the familiarity of the movement. The results are discussed in terms of an output buffer store of limited capacity capable of holding motoric plans for anticipated action.

Highlights

We report the results of both frequentist and Bayes Factor (BF) analytic approaches
There was some evidence for an interaction between response mode and concurrent task, with movements during encoding serving to reduce the advantage of enacted over verbal recall
Increasing the complexity of a concurrent motor task resulted in greater interference effects in working memory for instruction sequences. This effect was greater for enacted than verbal recall, with a significant recall mode x concurrent task interaction emerging, and a reduced enacted recall advantage observed. Taken together these findings suggest that the system responsible for generating spatial-motor movements does contribute to working memory, and to the enacted recall advantage in particular, though the continuing emergence of the enactment advantage in all conditions indicates that our manipulation of motor complexity was not sufficient to completely prevent action planning

Summary

Introduction

A good example of this is the practical question of how people turn verbal instructions into actions. In line with earlier findings in young adults (Koriat et al, 1990), children’s performance was enhanced when they were required to carry out the target activities as compared with recalling them verbally This enactment advantage is a robust effect and has since been widely replicated (e.g., Allen & Waterman, 2015; Jaroslawska et al, 2016, 2021; Lui et al, 2018; Makri & Jarrold, 2021; Waterman et al, 2017; Yang et al, 2019, 2021; see Allen et al, 2022, for a review). Evidence concerning the motoric component of working memory came primarily from dualtask studies that showed a double dissociation between short-term memory for configurations of bodily movements such as clenching the fist and movements towards external spatial locations (Smyth et al, 1988; Smyth & Pendleton, 1989) In these experiments, different types of concurrent movement were performed during the encoding phase of tasks assessing memory span for different types of action. This view would fit with a role for the motor system in working memory for actions (Cortese & Rossi-Arnaud, 2010; Rossi-Arnaud et al, 2004)

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