My movements help me remember better, what about yours?

Several previous studies have investigated how the production of movements influences visuo-spatial working memory. Some studies showed that movement during encoding facilitates the recognition of spatial arrays in a visuo-spatial working memory task. Another set of studies examined memory for self and other-performed action phrases, and found that self-performed phrases were recalled better than experimenter-performed phrases. Given these findings, the present study was aimed at investigating the question of how self and others movements interact with visuo-spatial working memory. Participants performed a task that required the maintenance of two consecutive arrays of three or four items, one encoded by visual observation accompanied by pointing movements (performed either by the participant or by the experimenter), the other only by visual observation. We found that self-performed pointing movements facilitated array recognition (at least for three-item arrays), whereas experimenter-performed movements impaired recognition performance. The results suggest that, like in the classical enactment effect, self-performed movements can improve visuo-spatial working memory performance in specific conditions.