Presenter: Emily Stutz – Psychology
Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Moss, Ulrich Mayr
Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation
Performing complex tasks usually requires the cognitive system to handle rules at multiple levels of abstraction, where lower-level rules depend on the status of higher-level rules (e.g., a child may be allowed to eat with her fingers at home, but use silverware in a restaurant). Previous work has identified verbalization (“inner speech”) as critical for such hierarchical control in the context of situations that require following a sequential plan. However, this work did not assess the need for inner speech in the context of non-serial, or cue-based tasks. Further, only relatively simple, two-level hierarchical control sequences were used. The current study used articulatory suppression to assess whether verbalization is important when handling complex serial-order and cue-based hierarchical tasks. Participants executed tasks with one, two, or three levels of either cue-based rule complexity or sequence complexity, while performing a secondary task that manipulated verbalization demands (articulatory suppression versus foot-tapping). Surprisingly and contrary to previous findings, we did not find a decrease in performance in either the cue-based or the sequential tasks with articulatory suppression. These results seem to indicate that hierarchical control does not require inner speech. Potential reasons for the discrepancy with the previous literature results are discussed.