Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers gestures provide a visual-motor representation from memory of what is being communicated. Yet the cognitiveand neural contributions to gesture form remain unknown. To examine this, we investigated how prior experience wasreflected in gesture in three groups: healthy adults, hippocampal-amnesic patients with declarative memory impairment,and brain-damaged comparisons. Participants completed a computerized TOH with differing visual/motor experience(visual curved disk trajectory/button-pressing; no visual disk trajectory/curved mouse-movements). After a 30-min delaywhen amnesic patients did not explicitly remember completing the TOH participants explained how to do the TOH. Weanalyzed the form of the gestures produced. Comparison participants and amnesic patients gestured in systematicallydifferent ways based on their prior visual and motor experiences. Thus, gesture reflects visual and motor features fromrepresentations in multiple memory systems.