Pierre Feyereisen at the University of Louvain in Belgium studied the affects of hand gestures on memory of his students.
He found they remembered more sentences that were accompanied by a meaningful gesture (e.g. “the buyer went round the property”, accompanied by the actor pointing his right index finger downwards and drawing a circle”) than sentences accompanied by a meaningless gesture (e.g. “He runs to the nearest house” accompanied by the actor holding his right hand open, palm facing upwards).
Feyereisen suggests it is the meaning inherent in gestures that acts as a memory aid, rather than the mere act of gesturing.
I wonder if some gestures are redundant cues or additional cues to memory? How might visual cues on a computer screen affect memory?
Feyereisen, P. (2006). Further investigation on the mnemonic effect of gestures: Their meaning matters. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18, 185-205.