Recall and recognition of self-performed acts

Summary In Experiment 1, recall and recognition of 80 action phrases were compared under two encoding conditions: verbal and motor (performing the denoted acts). Memory performance was better under motor encoding than under verbal encoding, and more so in recognition than in recall. We assume that this finding is due to the item-specific effect of a specific motor component in the memory trace after enacting. In Experiments 2 and 3 we further investigated whether false-alarm rates are dependent on the motoric similarity of distractor items. The rate of false alarms was lower under motor encoding than under verbal encoding, but the motoric similarity of distractor items to list items did not influence the false alarms. The results were interpreted as support for the assumption that motor encoding enhances item-specific information in relation to verbal encoding, but that during verbal recognition the motoric quality of the depicted movement is not processed.