Producing Gestures Facilitates Route Learning

Abstract

The present study investigates whether producing gestures would facilitate route learning in a navigation task and whether its facilitation effect is comparable to that of hand movements that leave physical visible traces. In two experiments, we focused on gestures produced without accompanying speech, i.e., co-thought gestures (e.g., an index finger traces the spatial sequence of a route in the air). Adult participants were asked to study routes shown in four diagrams, one at a time. Participants reproduced the routes (verbally in Experiment 1 and non-verbally in Experiment 2) without rehearsal or after rehearsal by mentally simulating the route, by drawing it, or by gesturing (either in the air or on paper). Participants who moved their hands (either in the form of gestures or drawing) recalled better than those who mentally simulated the routes and those who did not rehearse, suggesting that hand movements produced during rehearsal facilitate route learning. Interestingly, participants who gestured the routes in the air or on paper recalled better than those who drew them on paper in both experiments, suggesting that the facilitation effect of co-thought gesture holds for both verbal and nonverbal recall modalities. It is possibly because, co-thought gesture, as a kind of representational action, consolidates spatial sequence better than drawing and thus exerting more powerful influence on spatial representation.

How do gestures influence thinking and speaking? The gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis.

“…Therefore, relative to actions, gesture forces people to create richer internal representations of the objects and to build stronger links between body movements and thinking. This account can explain why, in the Tower of Hanoi task, gesturing leads people to represent the weights of the disks, which are not relevant to the task, more strongly than producing the actions does (Beilock & GoldinMeadow, 2010; see also So et al, 2014 for a similar view). However, it is difficult for this account to explain gesture's advantage in generalizing strategies (Novack et al, 2014).…”

“…This makes it more efficient to use the representations, as indicated by studies of route memory (So et al, 2014) and mental abacus (Hatano et al, 1977).…”

Gesture is More Effective than Spatial Language in Encoding Spatial Information

“…All PowerPoint files were then converted to video files. These routes were similar to those tested in So et al (2014). In each route, there were vertical, horizontal, and diagonal strokes, which were equal in length and connected to form a route navigating from the starting point to the destination (see Figure 1 for one of the 13-step routes).…”

“…Although previous study has established that producing gesture would facilitate encoding of spatial sequences (So et al, 2014), it is not clear whether the number of steps rehearsed in gestures (and spatial language, if it is found to be effective) would be positively related to recall performance. Previous research has shown that participants who were encouraged to gesture (gesture-encouraged condition) produced more gestures and performed better in the mental rotation task than those who were not encouraged to gesture but were allowed to move their hands (gesture-allowed condition; Chu & Kita, 2011).…”

Co-thought gesturing supports more complex problem solving in subjects with lower visual working-memory capacity

“…Furthermore, co-thought gestures are also consistently found to boost performance on other tasks, such as counting coins (Kirsh, 1995), mental abacus calculations (Brooks, 2014), tracking moving items in space (Delgado, Gómez, & Sarriá, 2011;Logan, Lowrie, & Diezmann, 2014;Macken & Ginns, 2014;So, Ching, Lim, Cheng, & Ip, 2014), solving fraction problems (Zurina & Williams, 2011), route learning (e.g., Logan et al, 2014;So et al, 2014), and rotating gear problems (e.g., Alibali, Spencer, Knox, & Kita, 2011;Stephen, Dixon, & Isenhower, 2009). The fact that these gestures also spontaneously occur without communicative intent suggests that, at least in some cases, gestures have a cognitive function that goes beyond supporting (communicative) speech processes (Pouw, de Nooijer, van Gog, Zwaan, & Paas, 2014;Pouw & Hostetter, 2016).…”