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Memory for series of action phrases improves in listeners when speakers accompany each phrase with congruent gestures compared to when speakers stay still. Studies reveal that the listeners' motor system, at encoding, plays a crucial role in this enactment effect. We present two experiments on gesture observation, which explored the role of the listeners' motor system at recall. The participants listened to the phrases uttered by a speaker in two conditions in each experiment. In the gesture condition, the speaker uttered the phrases with accompanying congruent gestures, and in the no-gesture condition, the speaker stayed still while uttering the phrases. The participants were then invited, in both conditions of the experiments, to perform a motor task while recalling the phrases proffered by the speaker. The results revealed that the advantage of observing gestures on memory disappears if the listeners move at recall arms and hands (same motor effectors moved by the speaker, Experiment 1a), but not when the listeners move legs and feet (different motor effectors from those moved by the speaker, Experiment 1b). The results suggest that the listeners' motor system is involved not only during the encoding of action phrases uttered by a speaker but also when recalling these phrases during retrieval.

Memory for action phrases improves in the listeners when the speaker accompanies them with gestures compared to when the speaker stays still. Since behavioral studies revealed a pivotal role of the listeners' motor system, we aimed to disentangle the role of primary motor and premotor cortices. Participants had to recall phrases uttered by a speaker in two conditions: in the gesture condition, the speaker performed gestures congruent with the action; in the no-gesture condition, the speaker stayed still. In Experiment 1, half of the participants underwent inhibitory rTMS over the hand/arm region of the left premotor cortex (PMC) and the other half over the hand/arm region of the left primary motor cortex (M1). The enactment effect disappeared only following rTMS over PMC. In Experiment 2, we detected the usual enactment effect after rTMS over vertex, thereby excluding possible nonspecific rTMS effects. These findings suggest that the information encoded in the premotor cortex is a crucial part of the memory trace., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The deep comprehension of a text is tantamount to the construction of an articulated mental model of that text. The number of correct recollections is an index of a learner's mental model of a text. We assume that another index of comprehension is the timing of the gestures produced during text recall; gestures are simultaneous with speech when the learner has built an articulated mental model of the text, whereas they anticipate the speech when the learner has built a less articulated mental model. The results of four experiments confirm the predictions deriving from our assumptions for both children and adults. Provided that the recollections are correct, the timing of gestures can differ and can be considered a further measure of the quality of the mental model, beyond the number of correct recollections., (Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effects of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. In the present investigation, we focused on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary-school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text, and we verified the derived predictions that gestures at the time of encoding would result in greater numbers of correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at recall, as compared to no gestures (Exp. 1), and in a bias to confound paraphrases of the original text with the verbatim text in a recognition test (Exp. 2). The predictions were confirmed; hence, we argue in favor of a theoretical framework that accounts for the beneficial effects of enactment on memory for texts.

The aim of the present study is to compare the pragmatic ability of right- and left-hemisphere-damaged patients excluding the possible interference of linguistic deficits. To this aim, we study extralinguistic communication, that is communication performed only through gestures. The Cognitive Pragmatics Theory provides the theoretical framework: it predicts a gradient of difficulty in the comprehension of different pragmatic phenomena, that should be valid independently of the use of language or gestures as communicative means. An experiment involving 10 healthy individuals, 10 right- and 9 left-hemisphere-damaged patients, shows that pragmatic performance is better preserved in left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) patients than in right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients.

A well-established literature reveals that a speaker’s gestures have beneficial effects on the listener’s memory for speech. A main assumption of our investigation is that gestures improve memory through the exploitation of the listener’s motor system. We tested this prediction in four experiments in which the participants listened to action sentences uttered by a speaker who either stayed still or accompanied the speech with congruent gestures. The results revealed that when the listeners observed gestures their memory for speech improved (Experiment 1), but loading up the listeners’ motor system during gestures observation cancelled the beneficial effect when the motor task involved the same effectors used by the speaker (arms and hands, Experiments 2–3). The beneficial effect of gestures persisted when the motor task involved different effectors (legs and feet, Experiment 4). These results support the assumption of a main involvement of the motor system in the beneficial effect of observed gestures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]