Enactment effects and integration processes in younger and older adults’ memory for actions

Abstract

The positive effects of gesturing on memory are robust but their interpretation is still controversial. To clarify the issue, recognition and cued recall of action phrases were compared in 24 younger (M=20 years) and 20 older adults (M=68 years), in three encoding conditions—purely verbal tasks (VTs), subject-performed tasks (SPTs), and experimenter-performed tasks (EPTs)—for well- and poorly integrated phrases. As expected, the effects of these factors were significant, but there was no interaction between age-related differences, enactment effects, and semantic association. In particular, both SPT and EPT displayed similar advantages over VT conditions in both age groups and in the two memory tasks. These results are discussed in relation to the debate between Engelkamp on one side, and Kormi-Nouri and Nilsson on the other side, about the role of motor components in the episodic integration of verbs and nouns in action phrases.

Keywords:

• Motor activity
• Associative memory
• Ageing

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Actions de Recherches Concertées numbers 98/03-215 and 05/10-327 of the Communauté Française de Belgique. The author is also funded as Research Director by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Belgium. I am grateful to Valérie Godeau for her collaboration in data collection and preliminary analyses. This work was presented in her unpublished Master's dissertation, written under my supervision (Godeau, 2003). Thanks also to Arnaud Badets for helpful comments on a previous version of the paper.