Abstract
Our aim was to examine the regulatory function that item familiarity has for the impact of physical properties on the enactment effect. We also evaluated the relation between motor and imagery encoding. In 2 experiments controlling for the familiarity of nouns in action phrases, free recall data showed that the presence of physical properties improved memory performance under verbal task-encoding conditions, regardless of item familiarity. In the subject-performed task-encoding condition, physical properties played a positive role in memorizing familiar items but not in unfamiliar items. These findings revealed the correlation between motor encoding and imagery encoding. The regulatory function of item familiarity was demonstrated, because the presence of physical properties had no impact on the enactment effect of familiar items but determined whether the enactment effect of unfamiliar items was significant. These findings provide empirical support for both the multimodal theory and the motor encoding theory of subject-performed tasks. We summarized the “item character view” to analyze the divergent conclusions about the enactment effect from the perspective of research methods and to promote the standardized development of action memory.
