The beneficial effect of a speaker’s gestures on the listener’s memory for action phrases: The pivotal role of the listener’s premotor cortex

•Memory for action sentences improves during observation of congruent gestures.•The listener’s motor system plays a crucial in this enactment effect.•The results reveal a pivotal role of the listener’s premotor cortex. Memory for action phrases improves in the listeners when the speaker accompanies...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain and Language Vol. 180-182; pp. 8 - 13
Main Authors: Ianì, Francesco, Burin, Dalila, Salatino, Adriana, Pia, Lorenzo, Ricci, Raffaella, Bucciarelli, Monica
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Netherlands Elsevier Inc 01.05.2018
Elsevier BV
Academic Press
Subjects:
Action
Adult
Auditory Perception
Auditory Perception - physiology
Behavior
Brain
Cortex
Enactment
Enactment, Gesture observation, Memory for actions, Motor system, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language, Cognitive Neuroscience
Female
Gesture observation
Gestures
Hands
Humans
Listeners
Listening
Male
Memory
Memory - physiology
Memory for actions
Motor Cortex
Motor Cortex - physiology
Motor system
Photic Stimulation
Photic Stimulation - methods
Phrases
Random Allocation
Recall
Regions
Speech
Speech - physiology
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - methods
Young Adult
Enactment
Gesture observation
Memory for actions
Motor system
ISSN:0093-934X, 1090-2155, 1090-2155
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:•Memory for action sentences improves during observation of congruent gestures.•The listener’s motor system plays a crucial in this enactment effect.•The results reveal a pivotal role of the listener’s premotor cortex. Memory for action phrases improves in the listeners when the speaker accompanies them with gestures compared to when the speaker stays still. Since behavioral studies revealed a pivotal role of the listeners’ motor system, we aimed to disentangle the role of primary motor and premotor cortices. Participants had to recall phrases uttered by a speaker in two conditions: in the gesture condition, the speaker performed gestures congruent with the action; in the no-gesture condition, the speaker stayed still. In Experiment 1, half of the participants underwent inhibitory rTMS over the hand/arm region of the left premotor cortex (PMC) and the other half over the hand/arm region of the left primary motor cortex (M1). The enactment effect disappeared only following rTMS over PMC. In Experiment 2, we detected the usual enactment effect after rTMS over vertex, thereby excluding possible nonspecific rTMS effects. These findings suggest that the information encoded in the premotor cortex is a crucial part of the memory trace.
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ISSN:0093-934X
1090-2155
1090-2155
DOI:10.1016/j.bandl.2018.03.001