Are the links between our actions and their effects stored consciously?
When people first learn which action produces which effect, that knowledge relies mainly on conscious (explicit) memory rather than automatic (implicit) memory.
Source
The representational nature of action-effect relations: A memory process dissociation approach
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Four online experiments: learning phase producing object images by key presses, then inclusion vs exclusion test; manipulated incidental vs intentional learning (Exp 2) and full vs divided attention (Exps 3-4); MPT models estimate explicit and implicit memory
- N
- Separate samples per experiment: Exp 1 N = 78, Exp 2 N = 193, Exp 3 N = 165, Exp 4 N = 64 (final samples after exclusions)
- Population
- English-speaking adult online participants recruited via Prolific
- Outcome
- Proportion of correct action repetitions (inclusion) or alternations (exclusion) at test, modelled as explicit (E) and implicit (I) memory parameters
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Participants pressed a left or right key to make pictures of everyday objects appear, experiencing each action-picture pairing three times. At test they saw the pictures again and either had to repeat the original key (inclusion) or deliberately press the other key (exclusion), which pits conscious recollection against automatic habits. Across four experiments the researchers also varied whether learning was incidental or intentional and whether attention was divided by a listening task, and used multinomial processing tree models to estimate separate explicit and implicit memory contributions.
What they found
Explicit memory contributed in every experiment and was larger than implicit memory; in Experiment 1, participants repeated the original action on .63 of inclusion trials and correctly alternated on .61 of exclusion trials. Being told to memorise the pairings increased explicit memory, and dividing attention during learning reduced it (e.g. inclusion accuracy fell from .85 to .58 in Experiment 3). Clear evidence of an implicit memory contribution appeared in only one experiment, and even there it was much smaller than the explicit contribution.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Each pairing was experienced only three times, so the findings describe early learning; implicit memory may grow with many more repetitions, as in classic ideomotor studies. The actions were simple key presses in an online task, which may not capture complex real-world actions. The implicit-memory finding from Experiment 2 was not replicated in Experiments 3 and 4, and the test was unspeeded, so fast automatic tendencies could have been overridden. The final sample in Experiment 4 was relatively small.
Key terms
- Action-effect relation
- A learned link between a movement and the perceivable change in the environment it produces.
- Ideomotor theory
- The idea that actions are selected by anticipating their effects, traditionally assumed to rely on automatic, implicit associations.
- Process dissociation procedure
- A method that compares inclusion and exclusion instructions so that conscious and automatic memory push responses in the same or opposite directions, allowing their contributions to be separated.
- Explicit vs implicit memory
- Explicit memory is consciously accessible and needs attention; implicit memory influences behaviour automatically without awareness.
- Multinomial processing tree model
- A statistical model that estimates the probabilities of hidden cognitive processes from the frequencies of observable response categories.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main method used to separate explicit and implicit memory?
Common questions
Why does the exclusion condition reveal implicit memory?
If people consciously remember the key they must press the other one, but automatic memory pulls them toward repeating the old key, so repetitions despite instructions indicate implicit influence.
Does this disprove ideomotor theory?
Not fully; it shows that early action-effect learning is mainly explicit, but implicit representations might develop later with extensive practice, possibly through consolidation of explicit memories.
Why manipulate attention during learning?
Explicit memory depends on attention while implicit memory is thought to be attention-independent, so divided attention should hurt explicit memory selectively, which is what happened.
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