Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 214, September 2021, 104731
Cognition

Role of verbal working memory in rapid procedural acquisition of a choice response task☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104731Get rights and content

Abstract

How quickly are instructions for a task translated into an effective task-set? If declarative working memory (dWM) is used to maintain a task's S-R rules until practice compiles them adequately into procedural memory, variables that affect retrieval from dWM should influence task performance while it is still dependent on dWM. Participants were trained on a series of 6-choice RT tasks, with a 1:1 mapping from object pictures to keys. In Experiments 1 and 2, an instruction phase — presentation of the S-R rules one by one —was followed by test trials. The phonological similarity of the objects' names significantly affected performance only during the first few encounters with the stimuli. Serial position effects were also consistent with retrieval from verbal dWM during those early trials. In Experiment 3, instruction onon the S-R rules was omitted, so participants had to learn the S-R mappings by trial and error alone; the effect of phonological similarity lasted longer, but still disappeared after a dozen encounters with each stimulus. Experiment 4 showed that instructions and just four trials of practice per S-R rule were sufficient to form a persisting representation of the S-R rules robust enough to interfere with later acquisition of a competing S-R rule after several minutes spent acquiring other task-sets. An effective and lasting task-set is rapidly compiled into procedural memory through instruction and early feedback; verbal dWM plays little role thereafter.

Section snippets

Preliminary experiments

We first mention briefly two preliminary RITL experiments which constrained the choice of stimuli and the number of stimuli per set for the main experiments we report here. Both used a CRT task with 1:1 mappings between just four stimuli and a row of four keys pressed with index and middle fingers of the two hands. In each cycle there was (i) an instruction phase, in which the four items were displayed serially accompanied by an indicator of which in the row of four response keys was the

Main experiments

The preliminary experiments supplied two constraints on the design of the main experiments. To capture use of dWM early in practice through a manipulation of phonological similarity, we need to be sure (a) that the initial declarative representation of the task-set is likely to require at least some use of phonological dWM, and (b) that the discriminability of the stimuli (as processed after acquisition of a fluent task-set) is not confounded with phonological similarity. Hence in the

Participants

Participants were drawn from the School of Psychology's volunteer participant panel, students or administrative staff, all young adult native speakers of English. Twenty four participants were tested,6

Experiment 2

This was similar to Experiment 1, but with twice the number of participants, each acquiring twice as many tasks. To keep the session length within bounds, and in the light of the acquisition function obtained in Experiment 1, we reduced the number of practice trials per task from 24 to 16 trials per item. We also added an exploratory manipulation of the rate at which the stimuli were presented during the instruction phase, motivated by the intuition that a more rapid presentation of the

Experiment 3

The modest effect of phonological similarity in Experiments 1 and 2 during the first four encounters with the stimuli, and its rapid disappearance after exercising the S-R rules just a few times, suggest that much of the work of compiling the rules into procedural memory was accomplished during the instruction phase. If this is correct, then omitting the instruction phase, and requiring the participant to acquire the rules by trial and error alone, should substantially prolong the period during

Experiment 4

If the initial effect of phonological similarity in Experiments 1–3, and that of articulatory suppression (van't Wout & Jarrold, 2020), reflect some mediation of performance by verbal representations in dWM, then it would appear that the disappearance of the effect after only a small amount of practice reflects a transition to performance based on some other representation of the S-R rules. What other representation? Our working assumption has been that after a few trials the S-R rules are

General discussion and conclusions

The experiments examined the early stages of acquisition of S-R rules for a six-choice reaction time task through practice with error feedback, with and without explicit instruction on the S-R rules before practice. The task was designed so that initial maintenance of the rules would be beyond the capacity of visual WM, but within the capacity of phonological WM, and so that the S-R rules were phonologically codable in WM by maintaining a list (or partial lists) of the stimuli as a sequence of

References (68)

  • K. Oberauer et al.

    Analogous mechanisms of selection and updating in declarative and procedural working memory: Experiments and a computational model

    Cognitive Psychology

    (2013)
  • A. Ramamoorthy et al.

    Word and deed: A computational model of instruction following

    Brain Research

    (2012)
  • H. Ruge et al.

    Distinct contributions of lateral orbito-frontal cortex, striatum, and fronto-parietal network regions for rule encoding and control of memory-based implementation during instructed reversal learning

    Neuroimage

    (2016)
  • D.W. Schneider et al.

    A memory-based model of Hick’s law

    Cognitive Psychology

    (2011)
  • M. Theeuwes et al.

    The role of motor imagery in learning via instructions

    Acta Psychologica

    (2018)
  • F. van't Wout et al.

    The role of language in task learning

    Cognition

    (2020)
  • T.R. Anders et al.

    Retrieval time in forward and backward recall

    Psychonomic Science

    (1971)
  • J.R. Anderson

    Acquisition of cognitive skill

    Psychological Review

    (1982)
  • A. Baddeley

    Working memory: Theories, models and controversies

    Annual Review of Psychology

    (2012)
  • A.D. Baddeley

    Short-term memory for word sequences as a function of acoustic, semantic, and formal similarity

    Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

    (1966)
  • P. Barrouillet et al.

    An empirical test of the independence between declarative and procedural working memory in Oberauer’s (2009) theory

    Psychonomic Bulletin and Review

    (2015)
  • M. Brysbaert

    How many participants do we have to include in properly powered experiments? A tutorial of power analysis with reference tables

    Journal of Cognition

    (2019)
  • M. Brysbaert et al.

    Power analysis and effect size in mixed effects models. A tutorial

    Journal of Cognition

    (2018)
  • J.M. Chein et al.

    The brain's learning and control architecture

    Current Directions in Psychological Science

    (2012)
  • N.J. Cohen et al.

    Preserved learning and retention of pattern analyzing skill in amnesia: Dissociation of knowing how and knowing that

    Science

    (1980)
  • M.W. Cole et al.

    Prefrontal dynamics underlying rapid instructed task learning reverse with practice

    Journal of Neuroscience

    (2010)
  • M.W. Cole et al.

    Rapid instructed task learning: A new window into the human brain’s unique capacity for flexible cognitive control

    Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

    (2013)
  • R. Conrad

    Acoustic confusions in immediate memory

    British Journal of Psychology

    (1964)
  • N. Cowan

    Short-term memory based on activated long-term memory: A review in response to Norris (2017)

    Psychological Bulletin

    (2019)
  • Dumontheil et al.

    Assembly and use of new task rules in fronto-parietal cortex

    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

    (2011)
  • N.J. Evans et al.

    Refining the law of practice

    Psychological Review

    (2018)
  • S. Exner

    Physiologie der Grosshirnrinde

  • F. Faul et al.

    G*power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences

    Behavior Research Methods

    (2007)
  • P.M. Fitts

    Perceptual-motor skill learning

    • Cited by (8)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    ☆

    This research was supported by a Leverhulme Foundation Emeritus Fellowship(UK) grant to SM. We are grateful to Ian McLaren and Félice van‘t Wout for comments on a draft. The data, stimuli, and E-prime scripts are available from Open Research Exeter Repository [https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.3264].

    View full text
    © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.