Working memory for movement rhythms given spatial relevance: Effects of sequence length and maintenance delay

ABSTRACT Temporal information is an essential component of human movements. However, it is still unclear how the temporal information is extracted from complex whole-body movements through observation and how it is encoded and retained in working memory. In the current study, we investigated how the sequence length and maintenance delay influence working memory for movement rhythms (i.e., temporal structures of movement sequences) after considering the task-relevance of the corresponding spatial information and the sensitivity difference between spatial and temporal processing in visual perception. We found that the sequence length – in the sense of information load more than temporal duration – may act as the first bottleneck in the processing of movement rhythms, deciding whether temporal information can be encoded as individual units in high precision or it might be encoded as an ensemble “whole” in relatively low precision. In addition, the maintenance delay may act as the second bottleneck, determining to what extent the encoded information can be retained in memory.