Learning from text benefits from enactment.

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effect of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. The present investigation focuses on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text, and we verified the deriving predictions that gestures at the time of encoding would result in a greater number of correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at recall as compared to no gestures (Experiment 1) and in a bias to confound paraphrases of the original text with the text verbatim in a recognition test (Experiment 2). The predictions were confirmed; hence we argue in favor of a theoretical framework which accounts for the beneficial effect of enactment on memory for texts.