
Speakers employ co-speech gestures when thinking and speaking; however, gesture’s role in autobiographical episodic representations is not known. Based on the gesture-for-conceptualization framework, we propose that gestures, particularly representational ones, support episodic event representations by activating existing episodic elements and causing new ones to be formed in the autobiographical recollections. These gestures may also undertake information-chunking roles to allow for further processing during remembering, such as a sense of recollective experience. Participants (N = 41) verbally narrated three events (a past autobiographical, a future autobiographical, and a non-autobiographical event) and then rated their phenomenological characteristics. We found that, even though gesture use was not different across the three event conditions, representational gestures were positively associated with the episodic event details as well as their recollective quality within the past autobiographical event narratives. These associations were not observed in future event narrations. These findings suggest that gestures are potentially instrumental in the retrieval of details in autobiographical memories.
Science, Memory, Episodic, Concept Formation, Emotions, Sensory perception, 430, Memory; Sensory perception; Semiotics; Emotions; Working memory; Memory recall; Information retrieval; Video recording, Memory, Psychology, Information retrieval, Humans, Speech, Semiotics, Science and technology, Gestures, Q, Working memory, R, Psychology; Science and technology, Memory recall, Video recording, Mental Recall, Medicine, Research Article
Science, Memory, Episodic, Concept Formation, Emotions, Sensory perception, 430, Memory; Sensory perception; Semiotics; Emotions; Working memory; Memory recall; Information retrieval; Video recording, Memory, Psychology, Information retrieval, Humans, Speech, Semiotics, Science and technology, Gestures, Q, Working memory, R, Psychology; Science and technology, Memory recall, Video recording, Mental Recall, Medicine, Research Article
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| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
