Cognitive processes that support adult memory for novel sequential actions

Abstract

Recalling the order of action sequences plays a considerable role in everyday routine functioning, but relatively little is known about the underlying cognitive processes behind the learning of such action sequences. The current study explored the role of prior knowledge in sequence learning, and the relative importance of verbal and motor processing during this learning. Participants viewed a series of action sequences and were either given prior knowledge of the object categories used in the sequences or not and were additionally asked to perform a motor or verbal dual task during learning, or had no dual task. After a delay they were asked to recall the sequence with a novel set of items. Recall for the action sequence was significantly stronger without the presence of a dual task, both with and without prior knowledge. There was also partial evidence that verbal processes may be more heavily involved in learning in comparison to motor processing. These findings indicate that full attention is required for action learning, and that real-world learning of actions may rely most heavily on verbal working memory.