title: Encoding the world around us: motor-related processing influences verbal memory.
abstract: It is known that properties of words such as their imageability can influence our ability to remember those words. However, it is not known if other object-related properties can also influence our memory. In this study we asked whether a word representing a concrete object that can be functionally interacted with (i.e., high-manipulability word) would enhance the memory representations for that item compared to a word representing a less manipulable object (i.e., low-manipulability word). Here participants incidentally encoded high-manipulability (e.g., CAMERA) and low-manipulability words (e.g., TABLE) while making word judgments. Using a between-subjects design, we varied the depth-of-processing involved in the word judgment task: participants judged the words based on personal experience (deep/elaborative processing), word length (shallow), or functionality (intermediate). Participants were able to remember high-manipulability words better than low-manipulability words in both the personal experience and word length groups; thus presenting the first evidence that manipulability can influence memory. However, we observed better memory for low- than high-manipulability words in the functionality group. We explain this surprising interaction between manipulability and memory as being mediated by automatic vs. controlled motor-related cognition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Canada. cmadan@ualberta.ca
authors.forename: Christopher R
authors.initials: CR
authors.lastname: Madan
authors.forename: Anthony
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Singhal
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D009068:Movement; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult