Caterina Trentin¹ (), Chris N.L. Olivers¹, Heleen A. Slagter¹; ¹Vrije Universiteit

Recent research suggests that action plans can influence sensory representations in visual working memory (VWM). For example, we found that two similarly oriented bars concurrently held in VWM were perceived as more dissimilar (i.e. repelled each other) when associated with different actions than when linked to the same action. In that study, the pairings between orientations and action plans were random, varying from trial to trial, indicating that the action-based repulsion effect resulted from rapid, short-term sensorimotor associations. In the current study, we examined whether the action-based repulsion effect is modulated by longer term associations. For this purpose, we implemented consistent mappings between specific to-be-remembered orientations and specific actions, and compared this to random couplings. Participants performed a task in which, in each trial, they memorized two bar orientations and then reproduced these using cued actions (either a grip or a slide action). Crucially, for some pairs, the bars were consistently associated with the same action (e.g., always grip) (fixed coupling condition), while for other pairs, they were randomly linked to either action (random coupling condition). Participants reported no explicit awareness of the fixed action-orientation associations, but when asked to guess did indicate the correct action at above-chance levels, thus providing evidence of implicit learning of action-orientation associations. We replicate our previous finding: orientations linked to different actions repelled each other more than those associated with the same action, across both conditions. Preliminary results further indicate that, in the fixed coupling condition, memory repulsion is larger than in the random coupling condition when the two bars are assigned to two different versus the same action. These preliminary findings suggest that action learning may enhance differences between VWM representations that belong to different action groupings, supporting the notion that affordances play an important role in structuring our memory landscape.