Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Co-speech hand gesture facilitates learning and memory, yet little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Ian andBucciarelli (2017) investigated this: participants watched videos of a person producing sentences with or without concur-rent hand gestures. In one experiment, participants hands were occupied with an unrelated motor task while watching.Gesture enhanced memory for sentences except when hands were engaged in the motor task, indicating motor systeminvolvement when gesture enhances memory. We investigated when and how the motor system is engaged in service ofmemory. We replicated the above design and cued listeners at retrieval with the same or different manipulation they expe-rienced at encoding (gesture/motor task). We predict that participants in the same motor task condition for encoding andretrieval will have better recall performance than those in mismatch conditions, suggesting that re-engaging or simulatingprevious motor experiences is critical in the relationship between gesture and memory.