Integrating Action-Effect Episodes into Long-Term Memory as a Function of Control

We interact with our environment through our actions, sampling information from environmental effects following them. Here we asked how control over action and ensuing effects influences long-term memory for the effect content and the actions that produced them. In three experiments, participants carried out spatial actions, which produced the movement of a box wherein an image was presented. The box either moved spatially congruent or incongruent with the participants’ action. Memory for images was later tested in a recognition test and we additionally probed whether participants retrieved the action used to produce an image when being cued with said image. In a fourth experiment, we kept the spatial effect component constant to directly investigate bindings between action and effect features. We found evidence for a facilitating influence of congruency on declarative memory for effect content and on action retrieval by perceived effect content. Moreover, if effect content was enriched with a spatial feature, such retrieval was only observed if that feature was spatially congruent rather than incongruent to the action which had produced that content. Thus, features of single action-effect episodes can be integrated and represented in long-term memory and the formation of these representations is facilitated by control. We propose that feature bindings can be conceptualized as source memory, representing how environmental effects were produced.