The Role of Hand Movement in Spatial Serial Order Memory

Research on serial order memory has traditionally used tasks where participants passively view the items. A few studies that included hand movement showed that such movement interfered with serial order memory. In the present study of three experiments, we investigated whether and how hand movements improved spatial serial order memory. Experiment I showed that manual tracing (i.e., hand movements that traced the presentation of stimuli on the modified eCorsi block tapping task) improved the performance of backward recall as compared to no manual tracing (the control condition). Experiment 2 showed that the facilitation effect resulted from voluntary hand movements and could not be achieved via passive viewing of another person's manual tracing. Experiment 3 showed that it was the temporal, not the spatial, signal within manual tracing that facilitated spatial serial memory.