Talking with your hands. My mother use to make fun of me for the amount of hand gesturing I did when speaking. She even made me sit on my hands. I have issues, but that’s another story. Now, come to learn that the gesturing may in fact be part of the way we work out our ideas and make decisions.
University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Goldin-Meadow are bringing together their respective fields of expertise to study the phenomenon. Beilock studies how action affects thought.
Goldin-Meadow studies gesturing.
The study has been published in the Psychological Science journal. They used a game called Tower of Hanoi. Volunteers moved stacked disks from one peg to another in the game. They were then removed to another room where they were asked to describe how they played. Naturally, they described their actions using hand gesture. They were asked to play the game again. This time, the researchers changed the weight of the disks. Oddly, they discovered that people who had used one hand for gesturing had a more difficult time moving pieces the second time they played the game. They believe that the telling and gesturing the first time around cemented the solution in the volunteer’s heads. When they went back to play again, and the game had changed, they had difficulty.
“Gesture is a special case of action. You might think it would have less effect because it does not have a direct impact on the world,” says Goldin-Meadow. She thinks it might have more “because gesturing about an
act requires you to represent that act.”
This could be useful for education where teaching a concept could be reinforced if students were asked to describe the process using gestures.
Source: Association for Psychological Science, Medical News Today
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