Movement planning and attentional control of visuo

Authors: M A Spiegel D Koester T Schack

Publish Date: 2013/07/06

Volume: 78, Issue: 4, Pages: 494-505

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Abstract

In this study we have investigated the influence of available attentional resources on the dualtask costs of implementing a new action plan and the influence of movement planning on the transfer of information into visuospatial working memory To approach these two questions we have used a motor–memory dualtask design in which participants grasped a sphere and planned a placing movement toward a left or right target according to a directional arrow Subsequently they encoded a centrally presented memory stimulus 4 × 4 symbol matrix While maintaining the information in working memory a visual stay/change cue presented on the left center or right either confirmed or reversed the planned movement direction That is participants had to execute either the prepared or the replanned movement and finally reported the symbols at leisure The results show that both shifts of spatial attention required to process the incongruent stay/change cues and movement replanning constitute processing bottlenecks as they both reduced visuospatial working memory performance Importantly the spatial attention shifts and movement replanning appeared to be independent of each other Further we found that the initial preparation of the placing movement influenced the report pattern of the central working memory stimulus Preparing a leftward movement resulted in better memory performance for the left stimulus side while the preparation of a rightward movement resulted in better memory performance for the right stimulus side Hence movement planning influenced the transfer of information into the capacitylimited working memory store Therefore our results suggest complex interactions in that the processes involved in movement planning spatial attention and visuospatial working memory are functionally correlated but not linked in a mandatory fashion

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