Effects of enactment by professional actors at encoding and retrieval

Remembering actions without proprioception

It has been suggested that agency signals generated by enactment provide memories with an enduring episodic marker that can successively be exploited to facilitate recall. Current theories of motor awareness highlight the role of prospective and retrospective sensorimotor cues in the construction of sense of agency (SA). To explore how these signals impact on memory for actions, we studied the effect of enactment in a patient with complete loss of somatic sensation below nose level, and compared her performance to that of a group of neurologically intact individuals. A memory advantage for enacted material was clearly detectable in the control group and, interestingly, also in sensory deafferented patient GL. This novel finding shows that robust memory for actions can be obtained even in the absence of somatosensory reafferences. We hypothesize that the neural processes evoked by intention to move, together with visual experience about one's actions, provide the long-lasting agency signals that are responsible for the special quality of self-performed actions and may support autobiographical experience. Proprioceptive cues, being more time-constrained, are critical to online SA but do not necessarily partake in offline action representations.

Active Experiencing Training Improves Episodic Memory Recall in Older Adults

Active experiencing (AE) is an intervention aimed at attenuating cognitive declines with mindfulness training via an immersive acting program, and has produced promising results in older adults with limited formal education. Yet, the cognitive mechanism(s) of intervention benefits and generalizability of gains across cognitive domains in the course of healthy aging is unclear. We addressed these issues in an intervention trial of older adults (N = 179; mean age = 69.46 years at enrollment; mean education = 16.80 years) assigned to an AE condition (n = 86) or an active control group (i.e., theatre history; n = 93) for 4 weeks. A cognitive battery was administered before and after intervention, and again at a 4-month follow-up. Group differences in change in cognition were tested in latent change score models (LCSM). In the total sample, several cognitive abilities demonstrated significant repeated-testing gains. AE produced greater gains relative to the active control only in episodic recall, with gains still evident up to 4 months after intervention. Intervention conditions were similar in the magnitude of gains in working memory, executive function and processing speed. Episodic memory is vulnerable to declines in aging and related neurodegenerative disease, and AE may be an alternative or supplement to traditional cognitive interventions with older adults.

What Studies of Actors and Acting Can Tell Us About Memory and Cognitive Functioning

The art of acting has been defined as the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Our many years of researching theatrical expertise have produced findings relevant to text comprehension, learning theory, cognitive aging, and expert memory. In this article, we first discuss how large amounts of dialogue, learned in a very short period, can be reproduced in real time with complete spontaneity. We then turn to abstracting the essence of acting and applying it to diverse undertakings, from discovering optimal learning strategies to promoting healthy cognitive aging. Finally, we address the implications of acting expertise on current theories of embodied cognition.

Your words are my words: Effects of acting together on encoding

Social influences on action and memory are well established. However, it is unknown how acting together affects the incidental encoding of information. The present study asked whether coactors encode information that is relevant to a partner's task, but irrelevant to their own task. In Experiment 1, participants performed a categorization task alone and together, followed by a surprise free recall test where they were asked to recall items from the categorization task. Recall was better not only for items that participants had responded to themselves, but also for items that their coactor had responded to, than for items that had not required a response. The same results were found in Experiment 2, even though financial incentives motivated participants to only encode words they had responded to themselves. Together, the findings suggest that performing tasks together can modulate how information relevant to coactors is processed. Shared task representations may act as a vehicle for establishing shared memories.

Gesturing makes memories that last

When people are asked to perform actions, they remember those actions better than if they are asked to talk about the same actions. But when people talk, they often gesture with their hands, thus adding an action component to talking. The question we asked in this study was whether producing gesture along with speech makes the information encoded in that speech more memorable than it would have been without gesture. We found that gesturing during encoding led to better recall, even when the amount of speech produced during encoding was controlled. Gesturing during encoding improved recall whether the speaker chose to gesture spontaneously or was instructed to gesture. Thus, gesturing during encoding seems to function like action in facilitating memory.

The effects of golf expertise and presentation modality on memory for golf and everyday items

The present study assessed whether golf expertise, presentation modality, and domain relevance affected memory for golf-related and everyday items. Forty-eight experienced golfers and 48 non-golfers were compared in their memory for golf-related ("putt to the hole") and everyday ("turn on the lamp") items. To-be-remembered items were presented verbally, visually, or were enacted. Enacted information was recalled best, followed by visually presented information. Combined effects of modality and golf expertise on recall of golf items were demonstrated on immediate but not on delayed recall. The findings suggest that recall of domain-relevant information is optimal when one has relevant background knowledge, and under conditions of visual encoding. The data support research on facilitation of domain-relevant knowledge on recall [Weber, N., & Brewer, N. (2003). Expert memory: The interaction of stimulus structure, attention, and expertise. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-308]. Interpersonal body representation may have played a role in recall processes among experts [Thomas, R., Press, C., & Haggard, P. (2006). Shared representations in body perception. Acta Psychologica, 121, 317-330].

Dissociations, Developmental Psychology, and Pedagogical Design

Although dissociations in children's responses are sometimes about "getting it right" for an experimenter, they might also often reflect differences between conscious and subconscious processing that are not geared to correct performance. Research with adults also reveals many cases of dissociation, and adults can more easily be subjected to neuroimaging methods that might help shed light on dissociation. Finally, much of the research on dissociations shows that human cognition is optimized in some contexts over others. School environments often correspond to less optimizing contexts. Research on dissociation could be used to inform pedagogical design.

The effects of noise and gender on children's episodic and semantic memory

The main objectives in the present study were to examine meaningful irrelevant speech and road traffic noise effects on episodic and semantic memory, and to evaluate whether gender differences in memory performance interact with noise. A total of 96 subjects, aged 13-14 years (n = 16 boys and 16 girls in each of three groups), were randomly assigned to a silent or two noise conditions. Noise effects found were restricted to impairments from meaningful irrelevant speech on recognition and cued recall of a text in episodic memory and of word comprehension in semantic memory. The obtained noise effect suggests that the meaning of the speech were processed semantically by the pupils, which reduced their ability to comprehend a text that also involved processing of meaning. Meaningful irrelevant speech was also assumed to cause a poorer access to the knowledge base in semantic memory. Girls outperformed boys in episodic and semantic memory materials, but these differences did not interact with noise.

Memory and action: an experimental study on normal subjects and schizophrenic patients

Psychologists have shown that recall of sentences describing previously performed actions is enhanced compared to recall of heard-only action-phrases (enactment effect). One interpretation of this effect argues that subjects benefit from a multi-modal encoding where movement plays a major role. In line with this motor account, it is conceivable that the beneficial effect of enactment might rely, at least in part, on procedural learning, thus tapping more directly implicit memory functions. Neuropsychological observations support this hypothesis, as shown by the fact that the enactment effect is quite insensitive to perturbations affecting declarative memories. i.e. Alzheimer disease. Memory for subject performed tasks in patients with Korsakoff syndrome. The present study attempts to evaluate whether pure motor activity is sufficient to guarantee the described memory facilitation or alternatively, whether first-person experience in carrying out the action (i.e. true enactment) would be required. To this purpose, in a first experiment on healthy subjects, we tested whether sentence meaning and content of the executed action should match in order to produce facilitation in recall of enacted action-phrases. In a second experiment, we explored whether the enactment effect is present in patients suffering from psychiatric disorders supposed to spare procedural memory but to alter action awareness (e.g. schizophrenia). We show that better recall for action phrases is found only when the motor component is a true enactment of verbal material. Moreover, this effect is nearly lost in schizophrenia. This latter result, on the one hand, queries the automatic/implicit nature of the enactment effect and supports the role of the experience of having performed the action in the first-person. On the other hand, it questions the nature of the memory impairments detected in schizophrenia.

Learning dialogue with and without movement

In two experiments, we investigated the contribution of physical movement to the processing and eventual retrieval of dramatic dialogue by untrained nonactors after they had received only brief procedural coaching. It was found that participants who processed a script by reading the text aloud while simultaneously moving in accordance with a director's instructions retained more material than did those who used verbal communication only or controls who deliberately memorized the same material. Furthermore, when the recall of the participants in the moving condition was analyzed on a speech-by-speech basis, the results showed significantly greater memory for speeches that had been accompanied by movement than for speeches during which the same participant had remained in one place. These findings are discussed in the contexts of embodied cognition and multimodal memory models.