Long-term memory
Do children remember actions better when they act them out?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Children remembered simple action phrases such as 'fold something in half' much better when they performed the action or watched it being performed than when they read or heard it, but acting it out themselves was not better than watching.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 2 (grade: second vs. fifth, between) x 4 (encoding: Read, Listen, Watch experimenter, Perform, within) design for 24 action phrases, followed by free recall, cued recall, recognition and source tests; correlations with short-term binding and narrative memory
- N
- N=35 · 15 second graders and 20 fifth graders
- Population
- Schoolchildren aged about 6-10 years in second and fifth grade
- Outcome
- Free recall, cued recall, recognition and source memory for action phrases by encoding condition; enactment indexes (Perform/Read, Perform/Listen); short-term feature binding and NEPSY-II narrative memory
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Key findings
Both age groups remembered watched and performed phrases better than read or heard ones, in free recall, cued recall, recognition and memory for the learning condition. Performing did not beat watching, which goes against the multimodal theory that self-performed movement adds a special motor code. Fifth graders remembered more overall. The enactment benefit did not correlate positively with binding ability; instead it correlated negatively with binding among fifth graders (r = -0.49) and positively with story recall among second graders (r = 0.81).
Methodology
Second and fifth graders learned 24 short action phrases under four conditions: reading them, listening to them, watching the experimenter perform them, and performing them themselves. After a roughly 15-minute filler task, they tried to recall the phrases freely, then with the action as a cue, then by picking the right object from a small set of studied objects, and said which condition each phrase had been learned in. Children also completed a short-term task requiring them to bind object names, locations and order, and a story-recall test of episodic memory, so the researchers could see which abilities went with a bigger enactment benefit.
Limitations
The sample was small, especially per grade (15 and 20 children), so the correlations by age group are unstable and a single strong correlation in second graders could easily shrink in replication. The cued-recall method only probed items not freely recalled, which the authors suggest may explain why watching and performing did not differ. Only one short-term binding task and one story-recall test were used, so the conclusion that binding does not underlie the enactment effect is tentative. The available text omits the participant and encoding-procedure sections, so recruitment details and exact presentation procedures cannot be checked here.
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