Following instructions in working memory: do older adults show the enactment advantage?

Objectives

In young adults, the ability to verbally recall instructions in working memory is enhanced if the sequences are physically enacted by the participant (self-enactment) or the experimenter (demonstration) during encoding. Here we examine the effects of self-enactment and demonstration at encoding on working memory performance in older and younger adults.

Method

Fifty young (18–23 years) and 40 older (60–89 years) adults listened to sequences of novel action-object pairs before verbally recalling them in the correct order. There were three different encoding conditions: spoken only, spoken + demonstration, and spoken + self-enactment. We included two different levels of difficulty to investigate whether task complexity moderated the effect of encoding condition and whether this differed between age groups.

Results

Relative to the spoken only condition, demonstration significantly improved young and older adults’ serial recall performance, but self-enactment only enhanced performance in the young adults, and this boost was smaller than the one gained through demonstration.

Discussion

Our findings suggest that additional spatial-motoric information is beneficial for older adults when the actions are demonstrated to them, but not when the individual must enact the instructions themselves.