LCNL and collaborators from Penn State’s Language and Cognition Lab will present “Plan Reuse in Motor and Language Production” at the 60th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Montreal on Thursday, November 14, 2019.
Authors: Amy L. Lebkuecher, Pennsylvania State University, Natalie Schwob, Pennsylvania State University, Misty Kabasa and Maryellen C. MacDonald, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Daniel J. Weiss, Pennsylvania State University (Sponsored by Daniel Weiss)
Abstract: The production of a complex sequence of actions requires the use of a hierarchical, abstract plan held in temporary memory. To lessen the cognitive load imposed on temporary memory by planning, individuals tend to reuse recently activated abstract plans and adapt them as needed rather than generate novel plans for each production instance. While this tendency for reuse (i.e., Plan Reuse) has been found in both motor and language production, research on planning in these domains has largely been conducted independently. The current study evaluates parallels in Plan Reuse across domains by comparing participants’ production choices on a motor task and a language task. The results indicate analogous patterns of Plan Reuse in both the motor and language tasks, such that hand choice and syntactic structure are repeated on consecutive trials. Plan Reuse may exist as a domain general heuristic for improving planning and production efficiency.
Email: Amy L. Lebkuecher, axl413@psu.edu
