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Combinations of Simple Mechanisms Explain Diverse Strategies in the Freehand Writing of Memorized Sentences
Author(s) -
Cheng Peter C.H.,
Genuchten Erlijn
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12606
Subject(s) - task (project management) , computer science , cursive , mechanism (biology) , control (management) , natural language processing , cognition , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , speech recognition , psychology , neuroscience , management , epistemology , economics , philosophy
Individual differences in the strategies that control sequential behavior were investigated in an experiment in which participants memorized sentences and then wrote them by hand, in a non‐cursive style. Thirty‐two participants each wrote eight sentences, which had hierarchical structures with five levels. The dataset included over 31,000 letters. Despite the deliberately constrained nature of the task and stimuli, 23 patterns of behavior were identified from the durations of pauses that occurred before the inscription of letters at four chunk levels, spanning letters, words, phrases, and sentences. A critical path task analytic model, Graphical Production of Memorized Sentences ( GP o MS ), shows that the control of writing relies on cues that continuously switch between motor actions and chunk retrievals in a just‐in‐time fashion at the level of letter information. GP o MS explains the individual differences in terms of variants of a motor production mechanism and variants of a chunk retrieval mechanism, which involve varying degrees of parallelism between cognitive actions and motor actions. A graphical technique for constructing GP o MS models was developed that enabled the estimation of ongoing working memory demands during production.