The effects of hand gestures on verbal recall as a function of high- and low-verbal-skill levels.
The author examined the effects of cueing for verbal recall with the accompanying self-generated hand gestures as a function of verbal skill. There were 36 participants, half with low SAT verbal scores and half with high SAT verbal scores. Half of the participants of each verbal-skill level were cued for recall with their own gestures, and the remaining half was given a free-recall test. Cueing with self-generated gestures aided the low-verbal-skill participants so that their retrieval rate equaled that of the high-verbal-skill participants and their loss of recall over a 2-week period was minimal. This effect was stable for both concrete and abstract words. The findings support the hypothesis that gestures serve as an auxiliary code for memory retrieval.
Frick-Horbury
Donna
D
Department of Psychology, Lees McCrae College, Banner Elk, NC 28604, USA. horburydf@hotmail.com
D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D014705:Verbal Behavior