Spontaneous gestures during mental rotation tasks: Insights into the microdevelopment of the motor strategy.

Abstract

This study investigated the motor strategy involved in mental rotation tasks by examining 2 types of spontaneous gestures (hand-object interaction gestures, representing the agentive hand action on an object, vs. object-movement gestures, representing the movement of an object by itself) and different types of verbal descriptions of rotation. Hand-object interaction gestures were produced earlier than object-movement gestures, the rate of both types of gestures decreased, and gestures became more distant from the stimulus object over trials (Experiments 1 and 3). Furthermore, in the first few trials, object-movement gestures increased, whereas hand-object interaction gestures decreased, and this change of motor strategies was also reflected in the type of verbal description of rotation in the concurrent speech (Experiment 2). This change of motor strategies was hampered when gestures were prohibited (Experiment 4). The authors concluded that the motor strategy becomes less dependent on agentive action on the object, and also becomes internalized over the course of the experiment, and that gesture facilitates the former process. When solving a problem regarding the physical world, adults go through developmental processes similar to internalization and symbolic distancing in young children, albeit within a much shorter time span.Keywords: gesture, mental rotation, cognitive development, problem solvingGestures that spontaneously accompany speech can be a window into a speaker's mind, especially the speaker's analogue imagistic thinking (McNeill, 1992). It has been argued that speech production processes are linked to gesture production processes at the level of conceptual planning (Kita, 2000; but see, e.g., Krauss, Chen, & Gottesman, 2000, for an alternative), as conceptually more complex speaking tasks trigger more gestures (Alibali, Kita, & Young, 2000;Hostetter, Alibali, & Kita, 2007;Melinger & Kita, 2007). Consistent with the view that gestures are involved in conceptualization processes, various studies have shown that gestures can reveal important aspects of problem solving and learning processes. For example, discrepancy between the content of gesture and concurrent speech indicates that children are in a transitional phase in the understanding of Piagetian conservation tasks (Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986) or arithmetic equations (Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow, 1988). Similar discrepancy in adults indicates that they are considering alternative strategies in a Tower of Hanoi problem (Garber & Goldin-Meadow, 2002).Gestures can provide insights into the choice of problem-solving strategies used by adults. Alibali, Bassok, Solomon, Syc, and Goldin-Meadow (1999) found that when people were asked to describe and then solve a mathematical problem, their gestures could predict the strategy they used in the solution. Schwartz and Black (1996) showed that gestures revealed how the type of problem-solving strategies chosen by the problem solver changed over the course of an experiment. These authors presented peo...

Co‐thought gestures in children's mental problem solving: Prevalence and effects on subsequent performance

“…As such, it keeps the question that motivated this study in the first place very alive: what is the cognitive function of co-thought gesture? Why does the current task invoke spontaneous pointing gestures, whereas others evoke more iconic pantomimic gestures (e.g., Chu & Kita, 2008)? Moreover, the current study can inspire a more systematic study into the development of co-thought gestures in children, as it provides a paradigm in which these gestures are naturally adopted.…”

“…That is, compared to not gesturing, co-speech and co-thought gestures are more likely to arise when the problem at hand is more difficult (e.g., Chu & Kita, 2008;Hostetter, Alibali, & Kita, 2007). Such gestures seem to provide additional cognitive resources when engaging in cognitively demanding dual tasks or when internal cognitive resources such as working memory capacity is low (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner, 2001;Marstaller & Burianová, 2013).…”

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

“…Because gesture originates in the action system, gesture can influence thoughts about spatio-motoric information, based on our bodily experiences in perceiving and interacting with the world, and about abstract information, via the metaphorical use of spatio-motoric information. However, gesture differs from practical actions in an important way: gestures are schematic representations (Chu & Kita, 2008;de Ruiter, 2000;Novack et al, 2014). Due to schematization, gestural representations (1) focus on essentials and neglect specific details, which facilitates generalization to new contexts (Goldin-Meadow, 2015), (2) can be processed efficiently, because representations are light-weight and are not bound to physical constraints, and (3) are flexible and modifiable, and therefore easy to adapt to the current goal.…”

“…Finally, we maintain that four functions depend on gestures being schematic representations, which focus on a small subset of information that is potentially relevant to the task at hand (Chu & Kita, 2008;de Ruiter, 2000;Goldin-Meadow, 2015;Novack, Congdon, HemaniLopez, & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). …”

Synchronization of speech and gesture: Evidence for interaction in action.

“…In addition, the speech and gesture systems are highly interactive (Kendon, 2004;McNeill, 1992). For example, when saying "rotating," speakers often draw circles in the air with an extended index finger (Chu & Kita, 2008), and the way people describe a motion event affects the gesture they use to depict it (Kita & Özyürek, 2003).…”