Investigating the role of language in instruction encoding

Recent findings have shown that language plays an important role in the encoding of novel task instructions. Specifically, Van ‘t Wout and Jarrold (in press, PBR) found that performance on a choice reaction time task was worse when a verbal distractor task (rather than a nonverbal distractor task) had been performed during the instruction phase of the task. This study aims to investigate whether this detrimental effect of a verbal distractor task can be attributed to poorer memory for the stimuli in each task, or whether the verbal distractor task affects the implementation of the stimulus-response rules. unknown other