%0 Journal Article
%T The Role of Enactment in Learning American Sign Language in Younger and Older Adults
%A Alison Fenney
%A Timothy D. Lee
%J ISRN Geriatrics
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/285860
%X ¡°Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand¡± (Confucius, 450 B.C). Philosophers and scientists alike have pondered the question of the mind-body link for centuries. Recently the role of motor information has been examined more specifically for a role in learning and memory. This paper describes a study using an errorless learning protocol to teach characters to young and older persons in American Sign Language. Participants were assigned to one of two groups: recognition (visually recognizing signs) or enactment (physically creating signs). Number of signs recalled and rate of forgetting were compared between groups and across age cohorts. There were no significant differences, within either the younger or older groups for number of items recalled. There were significant differences between recognition and enactment groups for rate of forgetting, within young and old, suggesting that enactment improves the strength of memory for items learned, regardless of age. 1. Introduction A growing volume of research is dedicated to understanding the role of physical engagement in learning, memory, and retrieval; however, this is by no means a new field of inquiry. Herman Ebbinghaus [1], a pioneer in the study of learning and memory, proposed a model that plotted the rate of forgetting and the factors that influenced the process of forgetting. Memory strength was dependent on two factors in his model: memory representation and active recall. Memory representation can be improved through environmental enrichment, which involved adding sight, sound, scent and tactile input to enhance the memory representation for an item. Active recall, or spaced repetition, improves memory strength by increasing time between recall so that the memory trace is being strengthened with each recall attempt [2, 3]. Environmental enrichment, the first component of Ebbinghaus¡¯s memory strength model, can include visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile stimulation to engage multimodal processing. Enactment engages tactile and kinesthetic feedback by pairing a physical activity or movement to an item to be remembered. Research has consistently shown that enactment of verbal items provides enhanced memory performance compared to traditional verbal recall tasks [4]. An example of enactment of verbal items would be bringing your hand to your mouth to mime eating, when the spoon or fork is the verbal item to be remembered. There are four main theories in the literature proposed to explain the enactment effect (also referred to as the subject
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.geriatrics/2013/285860/