Crossing hands behind your back reduces recall of manual action sentences and alters brain dynamics

Abstract

The experiment involved a 2 Verb (manual, attentional) x 2 Hand posture (front, behind) within-participant design. Half of the participants were assigned randomly to one of the two sets of 120 experimental sentences. The sentences were divided into 12 experimental blocks of 11 sentences each: 5 manual and 5 attentional sentences as experimental materials, and 1 filler sentence that was added at the beginning of each block to discard recall primacy effects and excluded from the analysis. An additional block of 5 sentences was used as practice. Each experimental block consisted of: a) learning phase, including the 10 experimental sentences in random order, plus the initial filler sentence, b) one-minute distractive task, c) recall phase. For more information about the data, please refer to the Corresponding Author