The Spatial Production Effect With Touchscreen Responses

The production effect is the finding that words read aloud are usually remembered better than words read silently, a benefit commonly attributed to the encoding of additional distinctive features. Recent work extended this phenomenon to visuospatial memory but found that clicking on dots impaired order reconstruction unless rehearsal was also reduced in the control condition, suggesting a trade-off between distinctiveness and rehearsal disruption. The present study asked whether more natural, body-anchored actions would shift this balance. Participants encoded sequences of eight spatial locations on a touchscreen and later reconstructed their order. In Experiment 1A, touching each dot impaired memory relative to remaining still. In Experiment 1B, however, touching the dots improved performance relative to a control condition in which participants touched irrelevant corner locations during encoding, thereby reducing rehearsal. In Experiment 2, a stronger embodied response, touching each dot and tracing the path between successive locations, again impaired memory. Thus, increasing bodily engagement did not restore the verbal production effect pattern. The findings are interpreted within the Revised Feature Model: spatial production can add distinctive features, but its benefits are outweighed when the required action disrupts serial spatial rehearsal.