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The effects of declaratively maintaining and proactively proceduralizing novel stimulus-response mappings
Silvia Formica1, Carlos González-García1, Marcel Brass1
1Ghent University, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Department of Experimental Psychology, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Cognition
|April 26, 2020
Summary
Declarative load in working memory (WM) impacts proceduralization, but not vice versa. This suggests an asymmetric cost in maintaining and manipulating information, with resources prioritizing declarative content first.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Working memory (WM) models distinguish between declarative (content of thought) and procedural (action-oriented) representations.
- Novel instructions are thought to be first encoded declaratively and then reformatted into procedural representations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the reciprocal costs of maintaining declarative information and transforming it into procedural representations in WM.
- To test how declarative load affects proceduralization and vice versa.
Main Methods:
- Participants memorized varying numbers of stimulus-response (S-R) mappings (declarative load).
- A retro-cue prompted reformatting of a subset into action-oriented (procedural load) representations.
- Performance was measured for both procedural implementation and declarative recall.
Main Results:
- Increased declarative load significantly impacted procedural processing.
- No significant effect of procedural load on declarative recall was observed.
- This indicates an asymmetric cost, with declarative maintenance taking precedence.
Conclusions:
- WM resource allocation appears asymmetric, prioritizing declarative content maintenance over proceduralization.
- Online reformatting of instructions into procedural codes is constrained by available attentional resources.
- This asymmetry is evident when procedural representations cannot be retrieved from long-term memory.
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