Abstract
Remembering interactive actions is crucial for guiding behaviors of human beings in society. In this study, we investigated how the significance of interactive biological motion (BM) information is embodied in working memory by asking whether there is a memory superiority for interactive BM in working memory, as well as the underlying mechanism. We present both interactive and non-interactive BM pairs, while participants were only asked to memorize the individual actions and complete a change detection task. The results uncovered a significantly higher memory accuracy for interactive BM pairs than that for the non-interactive BM pairs, no matter presenting the two BM pairs simultaneously (Experiment 1) or present two pairs one after another (Experiment 2). Followed eye-tracking studies found that participants devoted more attention resources to the non-interactive BM in the encoding and maintenance phase in a compensating manner. Taking together, the current study shows that interactive BM can be encoded and stored in working memory economically, exhibiting a memory superiority.