Abstract
Hand gesture, a ubiquitous feature of human interaction, facilitates communication. Gesture also facilitates new learning, benefiting speakers and listeners alike. Thus, gestures must impact cognition beyond simply supporting the expression of already-formed ideas. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting the effects of gesture on learning and memory are largely unknown. We hypothesized that gesture's ability to drive new learning is supported by procedural memory and that procedural memory deficits will disrupt gesture production and comprehension. We tested this proposal in patients with intact declarative memory, but impaired procedural memory as a consequence of Parkinson's disease (PD), and healthy comparison participants with intact declarative and procedural memory. In separate experiments, we manipulated the gestures participants saw and produced in a Tower of Hanoi (TOH) paradigm. In the first experiment, participants solved the task either on a physical board, requiring high arching movements to manipulate the discs from peg to peg, or on a computer, requiring only flat, sideways movements of the mouse. When explaining the task, healthy participants with intact procedural memory displayed evidence of their previous experience in their gestures, producing higher, more arching hand gestures after solving on a physical board, and smaller, flatter gestures after solving on a computer. In the second experiment, healthy participants who saw high arching hand gestures in an explanation prior to solving the task subsequently moved the mouse with significantly higher curvature than those who saw smaller, flatter gestures prior to solving the task. These patterns were absent in both gesture production and comprehension experiments in patients with procedural memory impairment. These findings suggest that the procedural memory system supports the ability of gesture to drive new learning.
Highlights
These findings replicate previous results obtained with healthy college-aged participants in between-subjects versions of these tasks (Cook and Tanenhaus, 2009). These effects were absent in www.frontiersin.org the patient group with impaired procedural memory, suggesting that intact procedural memory contributes to the capacity of gesture to drive new learning
They learned about the manner of how to manipulate the discs from the others’ gestures. Memory of their previous experience solving Tower of Hanoi (TOH) was apparent in their own explanations of how they solved the task. Their speech described the series of steps they used, while their gestures gave evidence of how they manipulated the discs, with higher, more curved gestures following their physical solutions and flatter, sideways gestures demonstrating how they manipulated the mouse on the computer solutions
Understanding others’ gestures appears to rely on one’s own motor system (Ping et al, 2014), perhaps providing a mechanism through which gesture influences later behavior as in Cook and Tanenhaus (2009). We have extended these findings by showing that healthy participants can learn from action observation— from the co-speech gestures they see during communication– while Parkinson’s disease (PD) participants with impaired procedural memory cannot
Summary
Gesture provides information about the speaker’s thoughts, and the information carried by gesture can either be unique to gesture or can reflect information expressed in the accompanying speech In this way, gesture provides a second informational stream during communication, both supplementing and complementing spoken language (Goldin-Meadow, 1999). Studies have shown that school children learn better when instruction contains both speech and gesture rather than speech alone (Perry et al, 1995; Valenzeno et al, 2003; Church et al, 2004; Ping and Goldin-Meadow, 2008, 2010).
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