Experience of memory: transfer of the motor feeling of fluency linked to our interaction with the environment

Abstract

In the field of memory, it is now admitted that an experience of memory is not only the consequence of the activation of a precise content, but also results from an inference associated with the transfer of the manner in which the process was carried out (i.e., fluency) in addition to the transfer of the process itself. The aim of this work was to show that experience of memory is also associated with the fluency that is due to the transfer of a processing carried out in our past interactions with our environment, independently the fluency associated with the stimulus in progress. First, participants performed a perceptual discrimination task (geometric shapes: circle or square) that involves a fluent or a non-fluent gesture to respond. Motor fluency vs. non-fluency was implicitly associated with the colour of the geometric shapes. Second, participants had to perform a classical memory recognition task. During the recognition phase, items appeared either with the colour associated with motor fluency or with the colour associated with motor non-fluency. We used a Go-NoGo task to avoid having a confused factor (response space). Results show that items were better recognised with a colour associated with motor fluency than with a colour associated with non-motor fluency. These findings support the idea that an experience of memory is also associated with the transfer of the motor feeling of fluency linked to our past interactions with the environment.