The importance of performing versus observing meaningful actions, on the enactment benefit to memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Performing an action symbolic of a word during encoding aids memory for the word, relative to reading it. This subject-performed task (SPT) is known as the enactment effect. Observing an experimenter perform an action (EPT) has also been shown to aid memory, similar in magnitude to SPT. We asked whether an EPT would confer a memory benefit when the action was unrelated, and when the experimenter was not physically present, but seen in a video. Target words were presented visually one at a time. Participants enacted them, performed a non-representational gesture, or read them, depending on the encoding cue (within-subjects), or watched videos of the experimenter carrying out these tasks (between-subjects). Memory was subsequently assessed in a free-recall test. Our results show that semantic relatedness of the action to targets is critical to benefit memory, and observing others performing actions in a video attenuates the benefit conferred from meaningful actions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".