Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 182, January 2018, Pages 65-74
Acta Psychologica

Effects of grasp compatibility on long-term memory for objects

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.11.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • In all four experiments, a grasp compatibility effect was found for object pictures and names.

  • Grasp compatibility had no effect on recall and recognition memory for the object pictures and names.

  • Motor actions are not automatically encoded in memory traces when participants encounter objects.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown action potentiation during conceptual processing of manipulable objects. In four experiments, we investigated whether these motor actions also play a role in long-term memory. Participants categorized objects that afforded either a power grasp or a precision grasp as natural or artifact by grasping cylinders with either a power grasp or a precision grasp. In all experiments, responses were faster when the affordance of the object was compatible with the type of grasp response. However, subsequent free recall and recognition memory tasks revealed no better memory for object pictures and object names for which the grasp affordance was compatible with the grasp response. The present results therefore do not support the hypothesis that motor actions play a role in long-term memory.

Section snippets

Participants

Forty psychology students of the Erasmus University Rotterdam participated in the experiment for course credits. Four participants were left-handed. Participant recruitment and testing followed the university ethical guidelines.

Materials

A set of 80 pictures was created. Forty were pictures of natural objects (e.g., apple, cherry). The other 40 were pictures of artificial objects (e.g., plunger, pencil). Within each category (natural or artificial), half of the objects afforded a power grasp (picked up

Participants

Forty psychology students participated in the experiment in exchange for course credit. Three participants were left-handed. None of the participants had participated in Experiment 1.

Materials and procedure

The stimuli were the words denoting the objects used in Experiment 1. We replaced three words because these were homonyms. The object names (and their replacements in parentheses) are listed in Appendix A. The procedure was identical to the procedure used in Experiment 1.

Semantic categorization

The same outlier criteria were used as in

Participants

Forty psychology students of the Erasmus University Rotterdam participated in the experiment for course credits. Three participants were left-handed. No participant had participated in the preceding experiments.

Materials

The materials and the set-up of the Grabbit in Experiment 3 were identical to those used in Experiment 1.

Procedure

The procedure of the categorization task was changed, and in particular the moment of motor-interference. Each categorization task trial started with the presentation of a fixation

Combined analysis of Experiment 1–3: recall data

To have a more powerful test of the grasp compatibility effect on memory, we performed an additional analysis in which we combined the recall data from Experiments 1 to 3. The 2 (compatibility) by 3 (Experiments) mixed ANOVA showed no difference in recall between compatible and incompatible objects, F(1, 117) = 0.41, p = 0.53, partial η2 = 0.00, (mean difference = 0.01, 95% CI [− 0.013, 0.025]), BF01 = 5.83. In addition, no significant interaction between compatibility and category on recall accuracy was

Experiment 4

We studied recognition memory in Experiment 4 because Van Dam et al. (2013) found an effect of motor action on long-term episodic memory for words in a single item recognition task. Possibly, a recognition memory task is more sensitive to motor information than free recall. In free recall, participants have to retrieve items from long-term memory while little information is presented to support retrieval. In a recognition task, items do not have to be generated from memory, but rather items are

General discussion

In three experiments, we investigated the influence of compatibility between the typical grasp size of an object and response grasp type on immediate semantic categorization and delayed free recall. In a fourth experiment we used a recognition memory task instead of free recall. We found that categorization responses were consistently faster in compatible than in incompatible conditions. In none of the experiments, however, did compatibility affect long-term memory. It is important to point out

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      Dutriaux and colleagues recently showed that manipulable objects were better remembered with the hands free than when keeping the hands crossed behind the back, while this manipulation did not affect memory for non-manipulable objects; importantly, this effect persisted when words (instead of images) were shown (Dutriaux et al., 2019; Dutriaux & Gyselinck, 2016). However, several other studies have systematically failed to find support for motor affordances in working memory using a variety of experimental paradigms (Canits et al., 2018; Pecher, 2013; Pecher et al., 2013; Quak et al., 2014), leading to a mixed picture. In a critical review of studies on the role of motor simulations in working memory, Zeelenberg and Pecher (2016) note that many of the paradigms that have yielded results consistent with a functional role of motor simulations in working memory do not in fact provide strong evidence for this claim, because the paradigm itself emphasized actions (e.g., by showing grasping movements before the to-be-remembered objects).

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    We thank Christiaan Tieman for technical assistance and Chrystel Luijendijk and William Kiil for their assistance with Experiment 4.

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