Does Gesturing Really Work To Improve Memory?
Christopher Philip
Summarizing The Findings
– Gesturing while encoding affects the memory of that event in a positive way.
– Gesturing during encoding improved free recall both immediately and after 3 weeks.
– It is likely that gesturing affects how people store and recall memories.
– Gestures used over time, can be a great help in maintaining memories and also facilitate learning.
– Gestures can improve memory even when people are do not do them freely, but rather, are specifically instructed to do so.
Common sense tells us that we remember both things we say and things we do. However, both types of memory are not the same. For example, by saying a list of words, it does not help us to remember them, but doing a set of actions does help us remember those actions. Therefore, it’s a safe bet that doing actions is more helpful in memory recall than simply talking about the actions.
Additionally, people often gesture while speaking, however, it is not known for certain why people do so. That being said, it is hypothesized that by performing gestures while speaking it helps people explain what it is that they are trying to say by activating brain regions where memories are formed as well to provide a visual element for others to decode. In other words, gesturing may help with memory because it brings an element of ‘doing,’ to speech.
Past studies have shown that people are more apt to recall information when it is acted out during the encoding process, rather than simply acted out upon recall. It’s also been shown that anticipating acting out upon recall also improved memory.
When people describe images from memory, they tend to use more gestures than when it is immediately in front of them. People also gesture when trying to remember infrequently used words. That being the case, it is not just difficult to recall information that makes gesturing more likely, rather gesturing increases the amount of information recalled. The same findings result when people are specifically instructed to gesture during recall. This is also found in children. In fact, when children are prevented from gesturing, they perform far worse. Interestingly, however, the additional details provided by children come in gestural form rather than speech. This suggests that gestures don’t exactly help recall words, bur rather form some tie with memory specifically.
Further research supports the idea that repeating gestures which were used during the encoding process, leads to greater and more accurate recall.
That being the case, few studies have specifically manipulated gestures during encoding to explore the ability of people to subsequently recall the information later on.
Thus, researchers Susan Cook, University of Iowa, led a team of researches, over two studies, looked at a group of participant’s ability to recall a series of videotaped events with spontaneous gestures and without.
Experiment #1 – Spontaneous Gestures
In the first study, a group of participants viewed 26 short video vignettes. The videos involved spatial movements and actions of objects, animals, and people. The specific videos were used because in previous research they tended to elicit greater gesturing.
The participants were then asked to recall the videos they had just seen after taking part in a short distracter task. A follow up to the study was also done 3 weeks later.
The use of gestures was coded for frequency. Results showed that speakers used gesture 47% of the time. When tested on follow up, the data show that those who used more gestures during encoding, recalled more detail than those who used less. This was more pronounced after the delay suggesting that memory is improved long term when gesturing occurs than when it does not. Additional findings also showed that those who used more gestures, also used more words overall.
Experiment #2 – Gesture or Keep Your Hands Still
In the second experiment, subjects were given the same relative procedure as experiment #1 except that they were instructed to either use their hands and gesture during immediate encoding or keep their hands still on their lap. This permitted the experimenters to affect the outcome of the recall of the subjects.
Results showed that the participants did indeed follow the instructions as 95% of the subjects gestured in the ‘instructed gesture’ condition whereas only 5% gestured in the ‘instructed no gesture’ condition.
Results showed that those who were instructed to use gesture were more likely to recall than those instructed not to gesture.
Experiment #3 – Recalling Hand Events
In the third experiment the procedure was replicated except the stimulus was changed to be more in line with enactment such that they would elicit more ‘hand-type’ movements. For example, depicted in the videos were acts such as blowing a whistle, flattening plasticene and rolling a pencil.
Results showed that 99% of the people told to gesture did in fact gesture and those told not to gesture only did so 3% of the time.
Results showed that there was not as strong an influence of recall on gestures when the memories were of everyday actions preformed by the hands. However, this may have resulted due to the fact that the gestures itself were illustrated beforehand by the person in the video thus boosting recall overall across the gesture and no-gesture condition.
Experiment #4 – Recalling Hand Events Through Pictures Rather Than Videos
The fourth experiment was much like the third experiment except that the stimulus to be recalled was in photo form rather than video form to eliminate the benefit of seeing the action being performed by someone else.
It was found in the gesture condition that gesturing had a much more profound influence over recall than the no-gesture condition.
The researchers think that seeing the targets in the video performing the actions somehow facilitated memory recall in experiment #3 because it primes their learning. So when people see another person doing an action, that action itself works to create memories since a person can envision themselves doing the action.
In other words, the authors say that “As hypothesized earlier, it is possible that watching someone perform an action may, on its own, activate motor representations; on this view, gesturing at encoding does little to further activate these representations.”
On the other hand, when a still image is presented, motor action may be required to facilitate later memory recall.
In summary those who viewed the images and did not gesture performed the worst. However, when videos were viewed with or without gesturing, people generally performed as well. Thus, the main outlier was gesturing and gesturing could be done either by a third party or if not, then done by oneself.
Image Credit: Pedro Ribeiro Simões
Resources
Cook, Susan Wagner; Terina KuangYi Yip and Susan Goldin-Meadow. Gesturing Makes Memories That Last. Journal of Memory and Language. 2019. 63: 465-475.