Sensory factors in memory for subject-performed tasks

Abstract

Action phrases such as “lift the pen” are recalled better when they are enacted by subjects in subject-performed tasks (SPTs) than when only listened to during verbal tasks (VTs). This SPT effect is usually attributed to the good item-specific information provided by enactment. A series of experiments investigated what role the use of real objects and the perception of the action play in the good recall of SPTs. For this purpose, recall of action phrases with and without using real objects was studied in VTs, EPTs (experimenter-performed tasks) and SPTs. It was found that the perception of real objects improved recall equally in EPTs and SPTs, but more so in VTs. Furthermore there was a recall advantage of SPTs over EPTs. However, with short lists, this advantage depended on whether the encoding condition was varied within subjects or between subjects. It was concluded that perceiving the objects used as well as perceiving the action proper does not play a decisive role in the good SPT recall. It was further concluded that EPTs and SPTs differentially depend on item-specific and relational encoding, and that relational encoding suffers from using a within-subjects mixed list design.