Abstract
People vary in their ability to perform cognitive tasks. One source of these individual differences is the strategy used, although this is rarely investigated despite potentially providing key insights into the underlying cognition. Here we developed a novel, comprehensive methodology for obtaining in-depth strategy use data. We then applied this technique to ten tasks, some known to be hippocampal-dependent and others not, as performed by 217 participants. We found both a consistent use and benefit of scene visual imagery strategies on hippocampal-dependent tasks, including autobiographical memory recall, future thinking and navigation. Notably, these effects were not limited to visuospatial tasks, but were also apparent for several verbal tasks such as word list learning. In contrast, tasks that are not reliant upon the hippocampus, including semantic memory, were associated with the use of verbal strategies. Overall, our strategy data suggest that scene visual imagery is prevalent across hippocampal-dependent tasks, aligning with the notion that the impairments observed in patients with hippocampal damage on these tasks may relate to their deficit in constructing visual scene imagery. We conclude that analysing strategies can illuminate our understanding of the processes underpinning widely-used cognitive tests, as well as informing individual differences and psychological theories. We advocate the interrogation of strategy use more routinely in order to increase the benefits that arise from this important dimension of cognition.
Footnotes
We thank Victoria Hotchin, Gloria Pizzamiglio and Alice Liefgreen for assistance with data collection and scoring, and Narinder Kapur for providing the Dead or Alive test materials.
All authors were supported by a Wellcome Principal Research Fellowship to E.A. Maguire (101759/Z/13/Z) and the Centre by a Centre Award from Wellcome (203147/Z/16/Z).
This manuscript has been uploaded to the BioRxiv preprint server. The test materials are all available in the published literature. The data will be made freely available once the construction of a dedicated data-sharing portal has been completed. In the meantime, requests for the data can be sent to e.maguire{at}ucl.ac.uk.