The role of goals and outcomes in young children’s memory for actions

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.