Motor expertise interacts with physical enactment to enhance action memory

ABSTRACT

Previous research on action memory showed the advantage for performing the action in memorising the action phrases. We tested if performing the action would help participants with or without motor expertise to memorise the novel action poses. Thirty novel action poses performed by an expert were photographed to constitute memory and interference stimuli. Eighty college students observed to remember the randomly displayed stimuli; however, half were asked to perform the displayed stimuli. Both free-recall and recognition tests were administered immediately and 24 h after the memory task. The results showed that acting was better than observing for memorising the novel action poses, which not only promoted the absolute retention but also alleviated the retention loss caused by interference. Motor expertise enhanced the overall memory performance by promoting a deeper motor encoding. Based on our results, novices should act with (rather than just observe) the model to learn novel motor skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Action memory
• motor expertise
• physical enactment
• action observation
• motor learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Notes

¹ Note that the recognition test has been associated with item-specific processing in previous studies using action phrases (see Steffens et al., 2015), in which participants had to identify the verbs or objects that they have learned among a list of words. However, in the current study, the recognition test was specific to the relational processing because participants were challenged to detect the contextual similarity/dissimilarity between action poses so that they could correctly identify the demonstrated action poses from those undemonstrated but look-alike action poses.

² Although the order of memory tests was counterbalanced for all participants, we included the test order in our original analysis to examine whether taking one memory test would affect another memory test performed subsequently. As revealed by the four-way mixed design ANOVA, the test order was insignificant on both dependent variables: d-primes (F_1,36 = .25, P > 0.05) and correct recall rates (F_1,36 = 1.16, P > 0.05); therefore, we collapsed the data to focus on the interested variables: motor expertise, encoding type and testing phase.

³ Although the larger SPT effect seen in the free-recall test than in the recognition test might be due to that the former test was physical and the latter test was visual in nature.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the visiting graduate student programme awarded to the first author by the Shanghai University of Sport (project number: stfx20150206).