Giving Memory a Hand: Instructing Children to Gesture Enhances their Event Recall

To investigate the influence of different kinds of gesture on children’s memory, 60 6- to 7-year-old children participated in an event conducted by the experimenters (“visiting the pirate”) and were interviewed to assess memory for the event approximately 2 weeks later. Children were assigned to 1 of 4 conditions; in 3 conditions, gesture was possible (gesture-instructed, gesture-modelled, gesture-allowed) whereas in the fourth condition (gesture-not allowed), children’s hands were constrained. The amount of gesture engaged in was limited but was greatest in the gesture-instructed condition. Children in the gesture-instructed condition, who were asked to gesture during the interview, recalled more than did those in the other conditions. Further, relative to children in the gesture-modelled and gesture-allowed conditions, children in the gesture-instructed condition conveyed significantly more information in gesture that had not also been reported verbally. Although further research is necessary to understand the underlying mechanism, the findings suggest that instructing children to gesture as well as verbally recall an experience has cognitive and communicative benefits.

[1]  K. Bird,et al.  Confidence Intervals for Effect Sizes in Analysis of Variance , 2002 .

[2]  N. Stein,et al.  Children's memory for emotional events: the importance of emotion-related retrieval cues. , 1995, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[3]  M. Alibali,et al.  Effects of Visibility between Speaker and Listener on Gesture Production: Some Gestures Are Meant to Be Seen , 2001 .

[4]  Claudia M. Roebers,et al.  The Effects of Accuracy Motivation on Children's and Adults' Event Recall, Suggestibility, and Their Answers to Unanswerable Questions , 2002 .

[5]  M. Pipe,et al.  Providing Props to Facilitate Children′s Event Reports: A Comparison of Toys and Real Items , 1995 .

[6]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  The role of gesture in communication and thinking , 1999, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[7]  Melanie Gleitzman,et al.  Children's reports of emotionally laden events: adapting the interview to the child , 2003 .

[8]  Susan M. Wagner,et al.  Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load , 2001, Psychological science.

[9]  M. Pipe,et al.  How quickly do children forget events? A systematic study of children's event reports as a function of delay , 2002 .

[10]  K. Salmon,et al.  Remembering and reporting by children: the influence of cues and props. , 2001, Clinical psychology review.

[11]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Silence is liberating: removing the handcuffs on grammatical expression in the manual modality. , 1996 .

[12]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal? Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking , 2003 .

[13]  D. McNeill.  Hand and Mind , 1995 .

[14]  H. Hayne,et al.  Drawing facilitates children's verbal reports of emotionally laden events. , 1998 .

[15]  Endel Tulving,et al.  Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. , 1973 .

[16]  Susan M. Wagner,et al.  Probing the Mental Representation of Gesture: Is Handwaving Spatial?. , 2004 .

[17]  R. Krauss,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article GESTURE, SPEECH, AND LEXICAL ACCESS: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production , 2022 .

[18]  Robyn Fivush,et al.  Do, Show, and Tell: Children's Event Memories Acquired through Direct Experience, Observation, and Stories , 1996 .

[19]  M. Alibali,et al.  Gesture and the process of speech production: We think, therefore we gesture , 2000 .

[20]  B. Ackerman.  Children's use of context and category cues to retrieve episodic information from memory , 1985 .

[21]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  A Helping Hand in Assessing Children's Knowledge: Instructing Adults to Attend to Gesture , 2002 .

[22]  R. B. Church,et al.  A comparison between children's and adults' ability to detect conceptual information conveyed through representational gestures. , 1998, Child development.

[23]  H. Hayne,et al.  The effect of drawing on memory performance in young children. , 1995 .

[24]  M. Wesson,et al.  Drawing and showing: helping children to report emotionally laden events , 2001 .

[25]  R. Guttentag,et al.  THE EFFECTS OF RESTRICTING HAND GESTURE PRODUCTION ON LEXICAL RETRIEVAL AND FREE RECALL , 1998 .

[26]  M. Alibali,et al.  The function of gesture in learning to count: more than keeping track * , 1999 .

[27]  H. Ratner,et al.  Understanding children's activity memory: the role of outcomes. , 2001, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[28]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Constructing communication by hand , 2002 .