Publication:
The role of gestures in autobiographical memory

Thumbnail Image

Departments

School / College / Institute

Program

KU-Authors

KU Authors

Co-Authors

Aydin, Cagla
Otenen, Ege
Tanis, Selma Berfin
Şentürk, Yağmur Damla

Publication Date

Language

Embargo Status

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Alternative Title

Abstract

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. © 2023 Aydin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Source

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Subject

Multidisciplinary sciences

Citation

Has Part

Source

PLoS ONE

Book Series Title

Edition

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0281748

item.page.datauri

Link

Rights

Copyrights Note

Endorsement

Review

Supplemented By

Referenced By

3

Views

3

Downloads

View PlumX Details