(2021). Investigating the underlying mechanisms of the Enactment Effect: The role of action-object bindings in aiding immediate memory performance. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Previous research has established that enacted action-object phrases lead to superior immediate memory performance compared to purely verbal memory. In the current investigation, Experiment 1 examined how enactment separately affects immediate memory for actions and objects in 24 adults by presenting action-object phrases and asking participants to recall either the actions or the objects presented in correct serial order. The results showed that when employed at presentation, enactment led to superior recall performance compared to verbal repetition, but this effect was significant only for memory for actions and not objects. Enactment during immediate recall did not lead to better memory performance compared to verbal recall for either actions or objects. In order to examine whether the lack of an enactment at recall was due to the splitting of action-object phrases at retrieval, Experiment 2 (n=24) examined memory for whole action-object phrases under enactment at recall. The results showed a typical enactment at recall benefit. Furthermore, a novel binding analysis suggested that enactment recall increased the likelihood of action features being remembered in a bound pair rather than alone. Together these findings suggest that action-object bindings play a crucial role in the manifestation of the enactment effect in immediate recall, especially when enactment is employed at the recall phase. obvious semantic associations or familiar pairings between verbs and objects. The 9 foam objects were divided into two sets; objects 1 to 8 formed one set and object 0 the other. The zero shaped object was used separately as a neutral object to perform the actions on in the enactment recall conditions. All foam objects (0 to 8) were of the same colour blue. The 8 verbs indicated the actions to be performed on the other 8 foam objects. The action verbs used in this study were chosen from a larger pool of verbs on the basis of their distinctiveness after pilot work. Those verbs were “push, shake, tap, drop, turn, rub, squeeze, lift ”. The 8 verbs and the 8 numbers created a total of 64 action-object pairs. A trial consisted of either 5 or 6 action-object pairs and those were presented in a randomised order. This trial length was shown to be the most optimal after pilot work. The pairs were pseudorandomised to ensure that no action or object appeared twice in the same trial or in the exact same position in the previous or next trial. In total 4 blocks were created, each with a unique combination of object-action pairs per trial. A group of 16 trials created a block. Each action-object pair appeared once in each block of trials and a total of 3 or 4 times across all blocks. The presentation order of these blocks remained fixed across all participants while the order of the encoding-recall conditions was counterbalanced across these blocks. The order of the four encoding-retrieval conditions were counterbalanced across participants. The task was created and presented in Microsoft PowerPoint.