Hand gestures support word learning in patients with hippocampal amnesia

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.

Learning From Gesture and Action: An Investigation of Memory for Where Objects Went and How They Got There

“…Regardless of why so many participants were unable to explicitly state the rule, the fact that they could not suggests that gestures and actions primarily affected implicit understanding of the relationship between handgrasp and end location. This aligns with previous reports from clinical populations (e.g., Hilverman et al, 2018;Klooster et al, 2014) that gestures affect learning through implicit processes. Of course, once implicit knowledge has been gained, that knowledge can become explicit.…”

Gesture Use and Processing: A Review on Individual Differences in Cognitive Resources

“…Current theories in cognitive science have not fully accounted for the existence as well as the causes of these individual differences for scientific gain ( Underwood, 1975 ; Vogel and Awh, 2008 ). Most of the earlier studies in the gesture literature disregarded the variation among individuals and focused on group comparisons based on age (e.g., Feyereisen and Havard, 1999 ; Colletta et al, 2010 ; Austin and Sweller, 2014 ; Özer et al, 2017 ), sex (e.g., Özçalışkan and Goldin-Meadow, 2010 ), neuropsychological impairments (e.g., Cleary et al, 2011 ; Göksun et al, 2013b , 2015 ; Akbıyık et al, 2018 ; Akhavan et al, 2018 ; Hilverman et al, 2018 ; Özer et al, 2019 ; see Clough and Duff, 2020 for a review), culture, and the native status of the speakers and the listeners (i.e., bilinguals vs. monolinguals; e.g., Goldin-Meadow and Saltzman, 2000 ; Mayberry and Nicoladis, 2000 ; Pika et al, 2006 ; Kita, 2009 ; Nicoladis et al, 2009 ; Gullberg, 2010 ; Smithson et al, 2011 ; Kim and Lausberg, 2018 ; Azar et al, 2019 , 2020 ) to understand how human multimodal language faculty operates at a general level. The gesture theories and current experimental practices in the gesture literature mostly downplayed the significance of individual differences and treated them as error variance.…”

Memory distortions: When suggestions cannot be easily ignored

“…All rights reserved. e.g., Engelkamp, 2001;Ianì & Bucciarelli, 2017;Hilverman, Cook, & Duff, 2018) and thus make them more believable and experienced as true (which is reflected in the belief rating).…”