Department of Psychology, University of Rome "Sapienza", Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy.
Psychol Res. 2012 Nov;76(6):699-712. doi: 10.1007/s00426-011-0394-8. Epub 2011 Nov 25.
The present four experiments examined the effects of pointing movements towards the target locations in a modified free recall task. Three factors were manipulated: the order of the move/no-move trials (blocked or mixed), the type of stimuli presentation (simultaneous or sequential) and the size of the to-be-recalled configurations (7-9 and 5-7 items). Results showed that pointing significantly decreased visuospatial performance both with a mixed and a blocked design. However, in the blocked condition the interference effect of pointing was load-dependent (being inversely related to array size) and occurred only when participants pointed to all stimuli in the first block. Post hoc analyses supported the conclusion that pointing movements interfered with the on-line development of appropriate retrieval strategies, like parsing the configurations into smaller chunks or creating global visual images.
本四项实验在改良后的自由回忆任务中，检验了指向目标位置的动作对记忆的影响。实验操纵了三个因素：移动/不移动试验的顺序（分组或混合）、刺激呈现的类型（同时或顺序）以及需回忆的图形的大小（7-9 项和 5-7 项）。结果表明，无论在分组还是混合设计中，指向操作都会显著降低视空间表现。然而，在分组条件下，指向的干扰效应与负荷有关（与图形大小成反比），仅在参与者在第一组中指向所有刺激时才会出现。事后分析支持了这样的结论，即指向动作干扰了在线发展适当的检索策略，如将图形分割成更小的块或创建全局视觉图像。
