Sensorimotor effects in surprise word memory – A registered report

Sensorimotor grounding of semantic information elicits inconsistent effects on word memory, depending on which type of experience is involved, with some aspects of sensorimotor information facilitating memory performance while others inhibit it. In particular, information relating to the body appears to impair word recognition memory by increasing false alarms, which may be due either to an adaptive advantage for survival-relevant information (whereby words pertaining to the body spread activation to other concepts and generate a confusable memory trace) or to a somatic attentional mechanism (whereby words pertaining to the body activate a false sense of touch that renders their representations less distinctive as memory trace and retrieval cue). To date, the existing literature does not distinguish between these two explanations. We set out to adjudicate between them using a surprise (incidental) memory task, where participants study the words under a guise of a lexical decision task, which allowed us to examine how participants form a memory trace for words grounded in bodily experience. We found support for the somatic attentional account, as body-related words increased false alarms even when attention was not directed to them at the study phase. Overall, the results provide further evidence for the importance of distinctiveness in word memory, and suggest a reinterpretation of the role of semantic richness in word memory.