Elena Daprati
Action awareness and memory for action events
Authors
Elena Daprati (IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma (I))
Studies in psychology have shown that performing a congruent movement while encoding action phrases significantly facilitates recall compared to solely observing the action or listening to its verbal presentation. It has been suggested that in the former condition, the actor benefits from a form of multi-modal encoding in which movement plays a major role (see Engelkamp, 1998 for a review). The present talk will address the issue whether motor activity per se and/or factors related to the experience of acting in the first person (i.e. sense of agency) contributes to this phenomenon. Specifically, the possible role of action awareness and efferent motor commands will be tested by examining the performance of different groups of patients suffering from neurological and psychiatric disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, Asperger syndrome). The contribution of first-person information to both implicit and explicit memory will be discussed.
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Judi Ellis
The influence of enactment and target-action relatedness on Prospective remembering
Authors
Judi Ellis (University of Reading (UK))
Antonina Pereira (University of Reading (UK))
Jayne Freeman (University of Reading (UK))
We report findings from a series of experiments that explore the benefits of enactment at encoding and target-action association on prospective memory (PM) performance under conditions of both standard and high attentional demands. The findings from two experiments reveal that PM performance when physical enactment was used to encode PM target-action pairs was superior to that observed when encoding was merely verbal. In addition, performance was higher when target-action pairs were more strongly associated. Furthermore, the beneficial effects of enactment at encoding and semantic relatedness were maintained under high attentional demands. Further studies investigate the influence of age on performance and examine the costs of prospective remembering under the above conditions on performance of the ongoing task in which the PM targets are embedded. The findings are discussed with respect to their potential impact on the developments of strategies to improve prospective remembering in people suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. There is evidence to suggest that PM may be particularly affected at an early stage in the development of Alzheimer's Disease, placing at risk individual's social relationships and maintenance of an independent lifestyle. The findings from these experiments are intended to contribute to the development of a rehabilitation technique for enhancing PM in these patients.
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Anne Eschen
The neural basis for the intended enactment effect in young and old adults
Authors
Anne Eschen (University of Zurich)
Matthias Kliegel (University of Zurich)
Mike Martin (University of Zurich)
Jayne Freeman (University Reading)
Judi Ellis (University Reading)
Thomas Dietrich (Children's Hospital Zurich)
Ernst Martin (Children's Hospital Zurich)
The intended enactment effect refers to a memory advantage for action words or phrases that are encoded for future enactment in comparison to actions words or phrases that are encoded for future verbal report or observation. It has been demonstrated in young as well as old populations. Behavioural studies (Freeman & Ellis, 2003) indicate that this memory advantage for to-be-enacted actions is caused by preparatory motor operations during encoding. Accordingly, in a first fMRI study with young participants, it was investigated whether differential activation of motor brain regions forms the neural basis for the intended enactment effect. Differential activation for the encoding of to-be-enacted action words in contrast to to-be-reported action words was indeed found in brain regions known to be involved in covert motor preparation. This differential brain activation was completely left lateralized. Therefore, a second fMRI study examined two possible causes for this left lateralization. Finally, a third fMRI study investigated age differences in the neural basis for the intended enactment effect, additionally controlling for the influence of mental simulation.
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Gertrude Rapinett
Time and context in determining the accessibility of intended tasks
Authors
Gertrude Rapinett (University of Zurich)
Jenny M. Rusted (University of Sussex)
Prospective remembering of an action entails the timely initiation of the intended action (prospective component) and also remembering the content of the action (retrospective component) (West & Craik. 2002). Moreover, the formation of an intention has been found to facilitate memory for the action events (Goschke and Kuhl, 1996; Marsh, Hicks and Watson, 2002). Specifically, the ISE produces speeded access to the intended action and is assumed to be instrumental in the initiation of the action. Its significance for the retrospective component of PM has not been yet established. In these experiments, we looked at the accessibility in memory of different components of PM and how the length until implementation of the prospective task and the context in which the implementation occurs modulate the degree of accessibility in memory.
The intention to perform an action produced faster recognition latencies but not when a free recall measure was utilized. We propose that this differential effect reflects a dissociation between the initiation of the intended action, and memory for the content of the action event. Additionally, we investigated whether accessibility in memory is influenced by the length of time until implementation and the context of implementation of the prospective event. Both time and context were found to modulate the level of activation of the intended action.
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