Ratner Hilary Horn, Foley Mary Ann
Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute, Wayne State University, 71 E. Ferry Avenue, Detroit, MI, 48207, USA.
Skidmore College, 50 Sherwood Trail, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866, USA.
Cogn Process. 2020 Aug;21(3):411-425. doi: 10.1007/s10339-020-00979-3. Epub 2020 May 23.
Four- to six-year-old children participated in three experiments designed to investigate action features that may contribute to the self-enactment effect and help clarify contradictory findings in the literature. Although activity is important in young children's learning and development, preschoolers' memory for self-actions is often found to be no better than memory for another person's actions. In the few studies in which the self-enactment effect has been found for this age group, the actions included as test materials differ markedly from those in the studies in which no differences occur. Specifically, the actions in studies finding the effect are goal-directed and enable outcomes whereas the actions in studies that don't find the effect have no instrumental goals, other than to perform the action, and often do not enable outcomes external to the action carried out. In Experiment 1 source memory and in Experiment 2 free recall were better for children's own actions than those of the experimenter when children participated in actions that produced outcomes in a game-like context. Findings from these two studies suggested that action outcomes were particularly important in these self-enactment effects which were then verified in Experiment 3. Our results support the role of self-directed actions for learning in early childhood classrooms, but highlight the contribution of goal-based activities that lead to instrumental and enabling outcomes in that learning.
4至6岁的儿童参与了三项实验，这些实验旨在探究可能促成自我演绎效应的动作特征，并有助于澄清文献中的矛盾发现。虽然活动在幼儿的学习和发展中很重要，但学龄前儿童对自身动作的记忆往往并不比对他人动作的记忆更好。在少数针对这个年龄组发现自我演绎效应的研究中，作为测试材料的动作与那些未发现差异的研究中的动作明显不同。具体而言，发现该效应的研究中的动作是目标导向的且能产生结果，而未发现该效应的研究中的动作除了执行动作外没有工具性目标，并且通常不会产生所执行动作之外的结果。在实验1中，当儿童参与在类似游戏的情境中产生结果的动作时，儿童对自己动作的源记忆比实验者的动作更好。在实验2中，自由回忆方面也是如此。这两项研究的结果表明，动作结果在这些自我演绎效应中尤为重要，这一点在实验3中得到了验证。我们的研究结果支持了自我导向动作在幼儿课堂学习中的作用，但强调了基于目标的活动在该学习中所做出的贡献，这些活动会带来工具性和促成性的结果。
