Open AccessThe Influence of Poststudy Action Congruency on Memory Consolidation
Author(s) -
René Zeelenberg,
Sebastiaan Remmers,
Florence Blaauwgeers,
Diane Pecher
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
experimental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.631
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 2190-5142
pISSN - 1618-3169
DOI - 10.1027/1618-3169/a000490
Subject(s) - psychology , action (physics) , priming (agriculture) , cognitive psychology , task (project management) , repetition priming , object (grammar) , lexical decision task , communication , social psychology , computer science , neuroscience , cognition , artificial intelligence , botany , physics , germination , management , quantum mechanics , economics , biology
. The actions associated with objects are thought to be automatically activated when processing object names. Recent studies, however, have failed to find evidence for a role of the motor system in long-term memory for objects. One exception is a study by van Dam et al. (2013) in which participants studied object names associated with pressing (e.g., doorbell) or twisting (e.g., jar), followed by pressing or twisting actions in a seemingly unrelated task. In the final memory test, performance for action congruent words was better than for action incongruent words. We aimed to generalize these findings. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found no effect of action congruency on repetition priming in lexical decision and man-made/natural decision. In Experiment 3, the action congruency manipulation was administered immediately after initial study or a day later, just prior to the recognition memory test. We found no effects of action congruency and timing of the action. Finally, Experiment 4 was a direct replication of Experiment 1 of van Dam et al. (2013) . Again, we failed to find an effect of poststudy action congruency. Thus, we obtained no evidence for the view that motor actions play a role in long-term memory for objects.