Articulatory suppression during instruction encoding impedes performance in choice reaction time tasks

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Linguistics

Background:

• Instruction following theories posit language's role in understanding and implementing directives.
• The precise contribution of language to novel instruction encoding remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the assumption that language is essential for learning and executing novel instructions.
• To determine the impact of verbal and non-verbal distractors on instruction encoding accuracy.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments (N=96) involved participants learning novel tasks with visual stimulus-response rules.
• Participants engaged in articulatory suppression (verbal distractor), foot tapping (non-verbal distractor), or no distractor during instruction phases.
• Instruction phase duration was manipulated (long: 60s; short: 30s/10s).

Main Results:

• Articulatory suppression significantly increased errors compared to non-verbal or no distractors.
• This detrimental effect was more pronounced with shorter instruction durations (Experiment 2).

Conclusions:

• Language plays a critical role in encoding novel task instructions.
• Time pressure exacerbates the negative impact of linguistic interference on instruction following.