Enactment encoding promotes relative temporal order memory.

Studies have shown that enactment improves memory; however, in daily life, our memories of motor events often exhibit a relative temporal order. Therefore, this study examined whether enactment promotes relative temporal order memory. In Experiment 1, a sequential recall task and a subject-performed task were used to explore whether enactment encoding improved relative temporal order memory. The results showed that the relative temporal order memory of the enactment-encoding group was significantly better than that of the verbal-encoding group, indicating that enactment promoted relative temporal order memory. Since temporal order memory is often affected by spatial cues, in Experiment 2, we further controlled spatial cues and used a 2 (spatial cues: consistent with temporal order, vs. no cues) × 2 (encoding type: verbal vs. enactment) design to explore whether spatial cues influence the effect of enactment encoding on temporal order memory. The results showed that compared with verbal encoding, enactment encoding significantly improved relative temporal order memory. However, no effect of spatial cues on relative temporal order memory was found. Our study confirmed that enactment encoding promotes relative temporal order memory performance independent of spatial cues.