Embodiment effects in spatial memory from childhood to young adulthood: Searching for benefits but finding mainly costs
Description
Several studies in the context of research on “embodied cognition” showed that moving your body can enhance cognition, if it modulates abstract mental representations. The current study investigates such effects in a spatial memory task across age. In study 1, children and adolescents from grades 1 to 10 and young adults (N = 148; 73 females) were tested in group-sessions. The task was to reproduce number series of increasing length. In the "embodied" condition, subjects walked to gymnastic mats on which the numbers from 1 to 9 were placed. In the "sitting" condition, the numbers were displayed on a screen (inter-stimulus interval 6 seconds). The order of conditions was counterbalanced across participants. All age groups, except the youngest, showed a deterioration of spatial memory performance in the embodied condition compared to the sitting condition. In study 2, young adults (n = 33, 18 women, mean age = 24.5 years) and children (n = 28, 11 girls, mean age = 7.3 years) were tested individually. The experimental design was identical to study 1, except that the size of the target fields was reduced to 50 cm2, and the ISI was reduced to 4 seconds. The results show no differences in spatial memory performance between the conditions for young adults or children. This indicates that “embodiment” does not always lead to cognitive performance enhancements. Instead, moving through space while thinking represents a dual-task situation, causing performance decrements in different age groups.