Quite ordinary retrieval cues may determine free recall of actions

Typically, action phrases like “break the match” are recalled better if participants are asked to enact the phrases than if they are just asked to remember them. This difference in recall rates is called the enactment effect. In accounts of the enactment effect, the role of differences between action phrases has remained open. In the present paper, it is hypothesized that free recall performance after enactment depends on the presence, during encoding and retrieval, of objects that are interactively encoded with actions and consequently may serve as retrieval cues. This hypothesis was tested in various ways and corroborated in three experiments. Enactment effects were consistently smaller, even nonexistent, for action phrases with objects absent than for phrases where the objects are present in the experimental context during encoding and retrieval.