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Combinations of simple mechanisms explain diverse strategies in the freehand writing of memorised sentences

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posted on 2023-06-09, 12:00 authored by Peter ChengPeter Cheng, Erlijn van Genuchten
Individual differences in the strategies that control sequential behavior were investigated in an experiment in which participants memorized sentences and then wrote them by hand, in a non-cursive style. Thirty-two participants each wrote eight sentences, which had hierarchical structures with five levels. The dataset included over 31,000 letters. Despite the deliberately constrained nature of the task and stimuli, 23 patterns of behavior were identified from the durations of pauses that occurred before the inscription of letters at four chunk levels, spanning letters, words, phrases, and sentences. A critical path task analytic model, Graphical Production of Memorized Sentences (GPoMS), shows that the control of writing relies on cues that continuously switch between motor actions and chunk retrievals in a just-in-time fashion at the level of letter information. GPoMS explains the individual differences in terms of variants of a motor production mechanism and variants of a chunk retrieval mechanism, which involve varying degrees of parallelism between cognitive actions and motor actions. A graphical technique for constructing GPoMS models was developed that enabled the estimation of ongoing working memory demands during production.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Cognitive Science

ISSN

0364-0213

Publisher

Wiley

Issue

4

Volume

42

Page range

1070-1109

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2018-02-12

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2019-03-23

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2018-02-09

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