Does context matter for memory? Testing the effectiveness of learning by imagining situated interactions with objects

ABSTRACT

Mounting evidence supports the efficacy of mental imagery for verbal information retention. Motor imagery, imagining oneself interacting physically with the object to be learned, emerges as an optimal form compared to less physically engaging imagery. Yet, when engaging in mental imagery, it occurs within a specific context that may affect imagined actions and consequently impact the mnemonic benefits of mental imagery. In a first study, participants were given instructions for incidental learning: mental rehearsal, visual imagery, motor imagery or situated motor imagery. The latter, which involved imagining physical interaction with an item within a coherent situation, produced the highest proportion of correct recalls. This highlights memory’s role in supporting situated actions and offers the possibility for further developing the mnemonic potential of embodied mental imagery. Furthermore, item-level analysis showed that individuals who engaged in situated motor imagery remembered words primarily due to the sensorimotor characteristics of the words’ referent. A second study investigating the role of inter-item distinctiveness in this effect failed to determine the extent to which the situational and motor elements need to be distinctive in order to be considered useful retrieval cues and produce an optimal memory performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodied and situated cognition
• memory strategies
• mental imagery
• word processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

The data, R code used for the statistical analyses, materials for all experiments and complementary results are available on OSF via this link: https://osf.io/3s8xd/

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 No mixed model were performed here as the data set structure changes to calculated d’. This data set lost its hierarchical structure with 20 words rows for each participant. Here, there is only one data point by participant.

2 However, we based our power analysis on Study 1 raw data rather than Marre et al. (2021) because it has a larger sample size (which prevent potential over-estimation of the effect size that might have happened in Marre et al., 2021) and has more comparable experimental conditions.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.