A Helping Hand in Assessing Children's Knowledge: Instructing Adults to Attend to Gesture

I see how you feel: Recipients obtain additional information from speakers’ gestures about pain

“…Taken together this indicates that gestures make an important contribution to communication, providing recipients with a more complete message than would be obtained from speech alone. Moreover, instructing participants to attend to gestures while watching videos of children explaining solutions to math problems increased the accuracy and amount of information obtained about the strategies used to solve the problems [31]. This provides preliminary evidence that it is possible to increase the uptake of information from gestures through instruction, with specific instruction about the types of information that gestures can convey providing the most benefit [31].…”

“…While the results indicate that such instruction is beneficial for increasing the uptake of gestural information, it is not clear whether this is due to specific knowledge gained about gestures or simply from raised awareness of this modality as a result of being instructed to attend to gestures. However, Kelly and colleagues [31] showed that increasingly explicit instruction (no instruction, hint, general instruction about gestures, and specific instruction about task-relevant gestures) resulted in incremental gains in accuracy, suggesting that the benefit of instruction is not simply related to raising awareness.…”

“…The use of short video clips is common in gesture comprehension research [31,45,46,[59][60][61] as it allows for fine-grained analysis, demonstrating that the effect of gestures is directly attributable to the information they contain, rather than, for example, participants just guessing more information when gestures are present. However, these are not representative of the longer, more complete pain descriptions that occur within clinical interactions, limiting the applicability of the findings.…”

Externalizing the Private Experience of Pain: A Role for Co-Speech Gestures in Pain Communication?

“…Research also needs to explore whether it would be beneficial to provide formal training to clinicians to help them to glean information from gestures. There is evidence that when viewing children's descriptions of Piagetian conservation tasks, adults are able to glean significantly more information from gestures following a short training session (Kelly, Singer, Hicks, & Goldin-Meadow, 2002). Evidence that clinicians spend a considerable amount time looking at patients' notes and tend to orient their posture and gaze towards medical records on the computer screen, rather than towards the patient (Hartzband & Groopman, 2008;Makoul, Curry, & Tang, 2001;Margalit, Roter, Dunevant, Larson, & Reis, 2006;McGrath, Arar, & Pugh, 2007;Noordman, Verhaak, van Beljouw, & van Dulmen, 2010;Rouf, Whittle, Lu, & Schwartz, 2007;Ruusuvuori, 2001) in which the doctor mimics the patients' earlier gestures (which depicted the sensation of a band tightening around the head) while explaining his assessment of the pain.…”

Explanation and Understanding

“…Children often give off information about their level of understanding in their gestures when they ask questions, information that is not always fully utilized by parents. Thus, when parents are taught how to attend to children's gestures in asking questions, adult explanations will show an improvement in quality and effectiveness (Kelly et al 2002). The subtlety of children's questions can be quite striking, e.g., preschoolers ask about the functions of artifacts as wholes but only about the parts of animals ).…”