The Semantic Processing Mechanism Of Enactment Effect In Action Memory

With the rise of embodied cognition of the second-generation cognitive science,the influence of physical action on individual cognition is paid more and more attention.At the same time,this viewpoint is also supported by enacted cognition theory,dynamic systems theory and sensorimotor theory.Under this research trend,since the early nineteen-eighties,the effect of action on cognition,especially the positive role of action on memory is increasingly studied.It is also highlighted that memory is not a single system,Tulving divided memory into episodic memory,semantic memory and procedural memory.Further,Engelkamp integrated modality-specific information into episodic memory and took action memory as a complement and extension of episodic memory.Action memory is a memory activity that is accompanied by action manipulation and that involves consciousness.The available studies mainly adopted the subject-performed task of laboratory experimental method to analyze the behavioral theory contradictions of enactment effect,adopted scenario simulation experimental method to explore the age-effect differences of enactment effect in children's action memory or adopted neuroimaging experimental method to clarity the cognitive neural processing mechanism of enactment effect.However,the above three research contents has their own shortcomings on the other hand.Literature analysis showed that the current research defects are mainly stem from a key question that the related studies only regarded motor encoding as a whole mechanism process and failed to treat motor encoding as a structured mechanism process.Besides,the various psychological components involved in motor encoding were still unclear.As a result,the behavioral and brain mechanism theoretical explanations of enactment effect could only explain the generation of enactment effect at the macro level.This disadvantage limited the depth and the specific of relevant empirical studies as well.From the perspective of exploring subject-performed task analytically,this study discussed the following three crucial and key questions: the activation of semantic component in enactment effect,the strategic processing nature of semantic component in enactment effect as well as the semantic processing mechanism in enactment effect.The significance of the current study is that the results will provide data support for the integrated evolution of the existing theoretical explanations of enactment effect from the semantic processing level.What is more,the results will also provide interpretation direction for the contradictory conclusions of empirical studies in action memory.To be specific,motor encoding theory,episodic integration theory as well as the viewpoint of exploring subject-performed task analytically made divergent explanations on the contribution of verbal specific processing and noun specific processing in enactment effect.While in relevant empirical studies,the experimental materials are lack of representation,the validity of testing mode is poor and the above problem has not been verified directly yet.On these basis,Experiment 1 pioneered the combination of subject-performed task paradigm and priming paradigm,used nonuniqueness gerundial phrases as experimental materials after balancing the length,familiarity and typicality of the materials and compared the difference contribution between verb specific processing and noun specific processing in enactment effect from encoding stage directly.The results showed that comparing with noun specific processing,verb specific processing was bias activated during the process of motor encoding and further promoted enactment effect to significant levels.Basing on the similarity that both action memory and prospective memory involved “to-be-performed” goal state as well as their crossing field did not keep the consistence of ongoing task and prospective memory task,Experiment 2 combined prospective memory dual-task paradigm and subject-performed task paradigm to take the lead in analyzing the semantic activation phenomenon of goal-related actions in motor encoding.In addition,the contribution of relational process between goal actions and goal-related actions was also examined.The results showed that,the semantic information of goal-related actions,which enhanced prospective memory performance,was activated while motor encoding.But the semantic activation level of goal-related actions was higher while verbal encoding and the promotion effect of the above semantic activation level enhanced prospective memory performance more significantly.In conclusion,the relational process between goal actions and goal-related actions made no contribution to the generation of enactment effect.In the premise of the results in the first section,the three experiments in the second section explored the strategic issues of verb-semantic component process,nounsemantic component process,and gerund-semantic component process in motor encoding process layer by layer.Literature analysis indicated that the dual conception view of enactment effect in action memory has not been focused by recent researches,and the inference task that empirical studies adopted on this theory was closely related to non-verbal internal number representation but not linguistic semantic processing.To this,Experiment 3,4 and 5 employed verb-semantic interference task,noun-semantic interference task and gerund-semantic interference task respectively and dissected the strategic issues of semantic component process in enactment effect.The results showed that the mentioned three semantic component processes of motor encoding are strategic.The enactment effect was significant under noun-semantic interference task but disappeared under verb-semantic interference task and reversed under gerund-semantic interference task.In brief,the integration effect of verb and noun played a more important role in enactment effect comparing with verb-specific processing.The two ERP experiments in the third section aimed at analyzing the semantic processing mechanism of enactment effect.Though embodied cognition research field supported that action could promote semantic understanding,the non-strategic encoding theory,dual conception view,multi-modality theory,motor encoding theory and episodic integration theory had not reached an agreement on whether semantic processing could promote the generation of enactment effect.Moreover,the empirical studies failed to provide sufficient and effective data for this question.On account of the above research status,Experiment 6 empirically analyzed the semantic feedback processing mechanism of enactment effect for the first time.The results showed that semantic integration enhanced the recognition performance under motor encoding but had no influence on the recognition performance under verbal encoding.More importantly,the gerundial phrases under motor encoding elicited more semantic N400.From the analysis of the functional as well as neural basis differences of structural manipulation representation and functional manipulation representation,it could be concluded that the differences between these two manipulation representations was neglected.Nevertheless,their differences were similar to the brain mechanism theoretical and empirical differences of enactment effect.Therefore,Experiment 7 explored the regulatory function that semantic feedback processing mechanism has for the brain mechanism theoretical controversies and contrary conclusions of enactment effect.The results showed that,during 500-900 ms after the stimulus presentation,functional manipulation representation phrases elicited more positive potentials at central region and parietal lobe,during 900-1500 ms after the stimulus presentation,structural manipulation representation phrases elicited more positive potentials at motor cortex in prefrontal lobe.In a word,the differences between structural manipulation representation and functional manipulation representation could provide analysis and exploration direction for the brain mechanism theoretical controversies and contrary conclusions of enactment effect.Last but not least,according to the data in the current study as well as the relevant literature analysis,the bias-feedback semantic processing model of enactment effect is put forward to provide prerequisite for the integration of the available enactment effect explanations from the perspective of exploring subject-performed task analytically.Simultaneously,the normative and standardized development of research methods in action memory can also be promoted theoretically.