Acting Out at the Movies: Enacting Actions Enhances Memory For Action Descriptions But Does Not Improve Memory or Segmentation of Movies

Performing actions boosts memory for descriptions of those actions; this is called the “enactment effect.” The enactment effect has been repeatedly found with verbal materials, but it is unclear if this effect generalizes to naturalistic materials that include linked sequences of actions and multimodal information. In four preregistered studies, we tested for enactment effects using naturalistic movies. Experiment 1 successfully replicated the enactment effect using descriptions of actions from the movies. In Experiment 2, participants read or acted out action descriptions and then watched a movie including those actions; no enactment effect was found. In Experiment 3, participants watched the movies while simultaneously copying the actions that the actors performed; again, no enactment effect was observed. Finally, Experiment 4 examined whether enactment affected how movies were segmented into meaningful events; once again, no enactment effect was observed. These results suggest that during naturalistic comprehension viewers may obligatorily engage motor simulations, rendering enactment manipulations redundant and thus ineffective.