Abstract
Visuospatial working memory is thought to be responsible for imagery generation (Cattaneo et al. in Imagery and spatial cognition: methods, models and cognitive assessment, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2006). This memory system was manipulated by varying visual perceptual input (see Baddeley and Andrade in Theories of memory, Psychology Press, Hove, 1998) in a narrative task in order to investigate the association between iconic gesture production and visuospatial working memory interference. Participants watched two short cartoon clips and were asked to relay a narrative about what they had seen in the videos to an experimenter. Participants were randomly assigned to relay their narrative while wearing video glasses with either a simple or complex moving image (unrelated to the cartoons) projected onto the lenses. It was hypothesized that if gesture production plays a role in facilitating visuospatial working memory resource activation, then participants in the complex visual distractor condition would display a higher rate of gesture production. Participants in the complex visual distractor condition gestured significantly more than participants in the simple visual distractor condition. These results are interpreted as lending support to the argument that iconic gestures may play a functional role in activating visuospatial working memory resources during a narrative task. Since visuospatial working memory is thought to support imagery, these results also suggest that gesture production may facilitate imagery generation.
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Notes
In the ‘In the Pink of the Night’ cartoon, participants in the Complex visual distractor Condition (M = 2.20, SD = 2.37) had higher iconic gesture rates than participants in the Simple visual distractor condition (M = 0.62, SD = 1.12) [t (33) = 2.487, p = 0.018]. In the ‘Jet Pink’ cartoon, participants in the complex visual distractor Condition (M = 1.94, SD = 2.59) had higher iconic gesture rates than participants in the simple visual distractor condition (M = 0.33, SD = 0.71) [t (33) = 2.486, p = 0.018].
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dr. Weimin Mou for lending us his video glasses for this study. We would also like to thank Bradley Poulette for doing the reliability coding for this study.
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Smithson, L., Nicoladis, E. Lending a Hand to Imagery? The Impact of Visuospatial Working Memory Interference Upon Iconic Gesture Production in a Narrative Task. J Nonverbal Behav 38, 247–258 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0176-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0176-2