The importance of performing versus observing meaningful actions, on the enactment benefit to memory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it