Hand gestures support word learning in patients with hippocampal amnesia
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Co-speech hand gesture facilitates learning and memory, yet the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting this remain unclear. One possibility is that motor information in gesture may engage procedural memory representations. Alternatively, iconic information from gesture may contribute to declarative memory representations mediated by the hippocampus. To investigate these alternatives, we examined gesture's effects on word learning in patients with hippocampal damage and declarative memory impairment, with intact procedural memory, and in healthy and in brain-damaged comparison groups. Participants learned novel label-object pairings while producing gesture, observing gesture, or observing without gesture. After a delay, recall and object identification were assessed. Unsurprisingly, amnesic patients were unable to recall the labels at test. However, they correctly identified objects at above chance levels, but only if they produced a gesture at encoding. Comparison groups performed well above chance at both recall and object identification regardless of gesture. These findings suggest that gesture production may support word learning by engaging nondeclarative (procedural) memory.
Source: Hippocampus
DOI: 10.1002/hipo.22840
Institutions: Vanderbilt University Medical Center, University of Iowa
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Connecting Mathematical Ideas through Animated Multimodal Instruction, Hand Gesture as a Window into the Cognitive and Neural Links between Language and Memory, EXP: Collaborative Research: A System of Animation Gestures for Effective Teaching Avatars, Language processing and the hippocampal declarative memory system
OpenAlex ID: W2791125412