Word Generation Affects Continuous Hand Movements

Understanding interactions between cognitive and motor performance is an important theoretical and practical aim of motor neuroscience. Toward this aim, we invited university students to move one hand back and forth at a self-paced rate either in silence or while overtly generating words from semantic categories. The same participants also generated words without movement. Word generation affected manual performance but manual performance did not affect word generation. Only the timing, but not the spatial features, of the hand movements were influenced by word generation. The simplicity of our procedure argues for its future use, both for theoretical and practical purposes.