Abstract: It is commonly established that simple action phrases, such as “open the book” or “break the tick”, were retained better when participants were instructed to perform the actions themselves than they learned the phrases by listening or reading. The excellent memory performance for subject-performed tasks (SPTs), compared to verbal tasks (VTs), has been called the SPT effect or enactment effect. Although a great many of researches had focused on the enactment effect as well as four theories had been proposed to explain the enactment effect, there was no unitary model to explain the empirical findings. The purpose of this article was to present the development of the four explanations on action memory and to address the enactment effect from the perspective of integrating the process procedures as well as the process system. The first theory was the nonstrategic theory. The researchers proved that action memory might be mediated by automatic processes. However, as the research moved along, critical words were put forward against the nonstrategic view. Now most researchers considered that the pop-out mechanism contributes to the free recall in SPT. Next, researchers put forward the multimodal view which considered the visual modality, the auditory modality, the tactual mode, even the olfactory as well as gustatory modes might be involved in specific SPTs. This multimodal notion was later extended a dual code view which stated that physical properties of SPT were encoded non-strategically, whereas the verbal components were encoded strategically. However, the argument of the dual code hypothesis by the proposers appeared contradictory results. So, most researches concentrated on the multimodal view other than the dual code hypothesis for the SPT effect. Then, the third theory - the motor encoding view was proposed by Engelkamp and Zimmer who argued that the memory traces were enriched by motor components in addition to verbal, visual, and conceptual components. The motor encoding was the key for enactment effect. As research continued, most researches demonstrated there may be a motor system for handling the motor information. Finally, we analyzed the episodic integration view which differed quite radically from the above three theories discussed. According to this view, the encoding of action events was wholly strategic and enactment increased the degree of self-involvement for subjects. Enactment increases the integration in three ways : (1) a better integration between the environment and the subject; (2) within-event integration; (3) between-events integration. Enactment encoding was considered the “glue” that cemented the components of actions into a memory unit or into closely connected memory units. In summary, we analyzed the theories and found that the nonstrategic view as well as the episodic integration view mainly concentrated on the memory process procedures, and the motor encoding theory as well as the multiple codes view mainly focused on the objects of the processing. Both of them paid attention to the one and ignored the other. So integrating the process procedures and the process objects may give us a window to explore the processing mechanism of SPT effect in action memory.

Key words: SPT effect, nonstrategic process theory, multimodal processes theory, motor encoding theory, episodic integration theory

摘要： 操作条件下的记忆效果好于语词条件下记忆效果的现象被称为动作记忆SPT效应。以往研究先后提出非策略加工、多通道加工、动作编码及情景整合理论来解释SPT效应，但这些理论解释仍存在矛盾和分歧，并阻碍了当前动作记忆领域的研究进展。为了解决目前的理论困境，本文详细地阐述了各理论的核心内容、发展历程及其存在矛盾和分歧的原因，并提出应以加工过程与加工对象相结合的视角来建立新的理论模型，以进一步促进实证研究的展开。

关键词: SPT效应, 非策略加工理论, 多通道加工理论, 动作编码理论, 情景整合理论