Encoding in verbal, enacted and autobiographical tasks in young and older adults

Abstract

Young and older adults participated in a task in which they were asked to say items printed on a card out loud (verbal condition), act out a command printed on a card (enactment condition), and retrieve memories associated with a theme or action printed on a card (autobiographical encoding condition). The results indicate that items in the subject-performed task and autobiographical memory condition were remembered equally well, and both were remembered better than verbal stimuli. Age differences were absent in the verbal condition, but present in both the enactment condition and the autobiographical encoding condition. We discuss the results in the context of earlier findings demonstrating a subject-performed task advantage in mixed-presentation lists (Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1997) and age differences in enactment tasks (Kausler & Lichty, 1982).

The authors wish to acknowledge Asmite Gherezgiher, Antonio Gonzalez, Pete Jamieson, Alvaro Ortiz, and Michelle Segal for their help in collecting the data and Colleen Kelley and Matthew Rhodes for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.