title: Manipulability impairs association-memory: revisiting effects of incidental motor processing on verbal paired-associates.
abstract: Imageability is known to enhance association-memory for verbal paired-associates. High-imageability words can be further subdivided by manipulability, the ease by which the named object can be functionally interacted with. Prior studies suggest that motor processing enhances item-memory, but impairs association-memory. However, these studies used action verbs and concrete nouns as the high- and low-manipulability words, respectively, confounding manipulability with word class. Recent findings demonstrated that nouns can serve as both high- and low-manipulability words (e.g., CAMERA and TABLE, respectively), allowing us to avoid this confound. Here participants studied pairs of words that consisted of all possible pairings of high- and low-manipulability words and were tested with immediate cued recall. Recall was worse for pairs that contained high-manipulability words. In free recall, participants recalled more high- than low-manipulability words. Our results provide further evidence that manipulability influences memory, likely occurring through automatic motor imagery.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, Biological Sciences Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E9, Canada. Electronic address: cmadan@ualberta.ca.
authors.forename: Christopher R
authors.initials: CR
authors.lastname: Madan
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001244:Association; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D009043:Motor Activity; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Association-memory; Cued recall; Embodied cognition; Manipulability; Motor imagery; Paired-associate learning