Working memory for ballet moves and spatial locations in professional ballet dancers

Abstract The aim of the present study was to investigate working memory for ballet moves in expert dancers. Experiment 1 showed that a concurrent spatial task did not interfere with the recall of a sequence of ballet moves when these were encoded alone without being associated with spatial locations. Experiment 2 showed that a concurrent motor task selectively interfered with the recall of ballet moves while neither a concurrent motor task nor a spatial task affected recall of the specific locations where each ballet move had to be performed. Experiment 3 showed that spatial interference affected recall of sequences of locations when these were encoded alone. Finally, in Experiment 4, a similarity effect for patterned ballet movements was shown. Taken together results show that spatial interference does not affect short‐term memory for ballet moves thus suggesting that working memory might contain a system for motor configurations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.