Levels-of-processing effects in subject-performed tasks

In memory for subject-performed tasks (SPTs), subjects encode a List of sim ple action phrases (e.g., thumb through a book, knock at the door) by perfo rming these actions during learning. In three experiments, we investigated the size of the levels-of-processing effects in SPTs as compared with those in standard verbal learning tasks (VTs). Subjects under SPT and VT conditi ons learned lists of action phrases in a surface or a conceptual orienting task. Under both encoding conditions, the subjects recalled fewer items wit h surface orienting tasks than with conceptual orienting tasks, but the lev els-of-processing effects were strongly reduced in the SPT condition. In th e SPT condition, items that were encoded in a surface orienting task were s till substantially recalled. The items were recalled almost as well as the conceptually encoded items in the VT condition. The distinct reduction of t he levels-of-processing effect is caused by the fact that, in SPT encoding even with a verbal surface orienting task, subjects process conceptual info rmation in order to perform the denoted action. We attribute the small conc eptual advantage, which remains with SPT despite the conceptual processing for performing, to the fact that items are not as well integrated into memo ry as they are when conceptual processing is focused on the action componen t, rather than on the semantic contexts. This lower integration reduces the accessibility of items in the verbal surface task, even with SPT encoding.