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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Oct 15, 2025

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
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Enhancing memory using enactment: does meaning matter in action production?

Yadurshana Sivashankar1, Myra A Fernandes1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.

Memory (Hove, England)
|October 26, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Performing meaningful actions during learning significantly improves memory recall compared to reading or performing unrelated gestures. This "enactment benefit" is driven by the planning and execution of relevant motor activities.

Keywords:
Enactmentaction memoryfree-recallgesturesemantics

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Memory Research

Background:

  • Enactment, a memory encoding strategy, involves performing an action related to a target item, enhancing recall compared to verbal encoding.
  • The precise mechanism by which motor activity improves memory is not fully understood.
  • It remains unclear if the action must be semantically relevant to the target word.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the semantic relevance of an action to a target word is necessary for the enactment benefit.
  • To determine if planning and executing meaningful actions contribute to enhanced memory performance.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: Compared memory recall for action verbs after enactment, performing unrelated gestures, or reading.
  • Experiment 2: Assessed memory recall after participants wrote target words in the air.
  • Experiment 3: Recorded action initiation onset times during enactment, gesturing, and reading using video conferencing.

Main Results:

  • Enacted words showed significantly higher recall than words that were read or encoded with unrelated gestures.
  • Writing words in the air yielded similar memory benefits.
  • Longer action initiation onset times were observed for enactment trials compared to gesturing and reading trials.

Conclusions:

  • The enactment benefit in memory is driven by the planning and execution of meaningful actions.
  • Semantic relevance and the cognitive processes involved in planning motor actions contribute to memory enhancement.