Many hands make light work : The facilitative role of gesture in verbal improvisation

This document is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Carine Lewis, Peter Lovatt, and Elizabeth Kirk, ‘Many hands make light work: the facilitative role of gesture in verbal improvisation’, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Vol 17, pp. 149-157, September 2015, first published online 25 June 2015. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The version of record is available online at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2015.06.001 © 2015 Elsevier. All rights reserved.Verbal improvisation is cognitively demanding, placing great burden on working memory as the speaker is tasked to generate a novel, spontaneous narrative. It is at this point of cognitive overload when individuals pursuing other creative tasks would typically shift the burden and externalise some of their thinking. How do successful verbal improvisers manage without shifting some of their workload into an external space? We argue in this paper that the improviser makes use of what is, quite literally, to hand. Ninety participants were asked to take part in a one-to-one improvisation task and a control task, order counterbalanced, in which they were engaged in a brief conversation to elicit every day speech. Participants' gestures were analysed in both conditions and improvisations rated for quality. As predicted, participants gestured significantly more in the improvisation condition. An analysis of gesture type revealed that improvising elicited greater iconic and deictic gestures, whereas everyday speech was more likely to be accompanied by self-adaptor gestures. Gesture rate was related to the quality of the improvisation, with both the strongest and weakest improvisers producing the most gestures. These gestures revealed the extent to which participants used gestures to facilitate the improvisation task. The strongest improvisers elicited a higher gesture rate for iconic and beat gestures, while weakest improvisers produced more gestures in reference to the abstract, improvisation object. Findings are discussed in relation to the idea that gesture can facilitate performance in verbal improvisation.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

When kids act out: a comparison of embodied methods to improve children's memory for a story

Over the last decade, embodied cognition, the idea that sensorimotor processes facilitate higher cognitive processes, has proven useful for improving children's memory for a story. In order to compare the benefits of two embodiment techniques, active experiencing (AE) and indexing, for children's memory for a story, we compared the immediate recall of different types of idea units across three conditions. Participants were between the ages of 7 and 11 and were randomly allocated to experimental conditions. The experimental groups were matched on comprehension ability and age. In the indexing condition, children acted out a short story using a playset (i.e., a Playmobil® playset with figurines), in the AE condition, children read the story using enactment, and during the control condition, children simply read the story. We predicted that children in the indexing condition would recall more action-based idea units, whilst children in the AE condition would recall more descriptive and dialogic idea units. Children in the AE condition recalled more descriptive idea units than in the control condition, whilst in the indexing condition, only poorer comprehenders recalled more descriptive information. Our findings suggest that these two embodiment techniques effect different components of reading comprehension and that future research should investigate these differences more specifically

Cognitive-Load Theory: Methods to Manage Working Memory Load in the Learning of Complex Tasks

Cognitive-load researchers attempt to engineer the instructional control of cognitive load by designing methods that substitute productive for unproductive cognitive load. This article highlights proven and new methods to achieve this instructional control by focusing on the cognitive architecture used by cognitive-load theory and aspects of the learning task, the learner, and the learning environment

Toward a more embedded/extended perspective on the cognitive function of gestures

Gestures are often considered to be demonstrative of the embodied nature of the mind (Hostetter and Alibali, 2008). In this article, we review current theories and research targeted at the intra-cognitive role of gestures. We ask the question how can gestures support internal cognitive processes of the gesturer? We suggest that extant theories are in a sense disembodied, because they focus solely on embodiment in terms of the sensorimotor neural precursors of gestures. As a result, current theories on the intra-cognitive role of gestures are lacking in explanatory scope to address how gestures-as-bodily-acts fulfill a cognitive function. On the basis of recent theoretical appeals that focus on the possibly embedded/extended cognitive role of gestures (Clark, 2013), we suggest that gestures are external physical tools of the cognitive system that replace and support otherwise solely internal cognitive processes. That is gestures provide the cognitive system with a stable external physical and visual presence that can provide means to think with. We show that there is a considerable amount of overlap between the way the human cognitive system has been found to use its environment, and how gestures are used during cognitive processes. Lastly, we provide several suggestions of how to investigate the embedded/extended perspective of the cognitive function of gestures

Psychomotor skills necessary for the success of young children in the 21st century

The term success in the Positive Education Theory describes a state of mind in which children enjoy the activities they perform and feel that those activities are significant for them (White & Kern, 2018). The feeling of significance stems from the perception that children gradually improve in the challenges that they have taken on and that their potential for choosing new challenges continues to increases with time.  Instilling the ambition for this type of success maintains the children’s motivation to work and learn across time (Adler, 2017). The physical-motor domain has many advantages in developing the potential for success. Each improvement is visible, is not necessarily dependent on the verbal sense and can improve in independent trial and error processes (Shoval et al., 2014). Improving quality of movement and extending movement challenges have no end point and they can continue throughout life.  Even after a crisis – injury or illness – it is possible to begin from a relatively low starting point and gradually improve one’s physical ability – that is, to succeed

Embodied learning in the classroom: Effects on primary school children’s attention and foreign language vocabulary learning

Objectives: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of specifically designed physical activities on primary school children’s foreign language vocabulary learning and attentional performance. Design: A total of 104 children aged between 8 and 10 years were assigned to either (a) an embodied learning condition consisting of task-relevant physical activities, (b) a physical activity condition involving task-irrelevant physical activities, or (c) a control condition consisting of a sedentary teaching style. Within a 2-week teaching program, consisting of four learning sessions, children had to learn 20 foreign language words. Method: Children were tested on their memory performance (cued r

Using Gestures and Body Movements for Thinking and Learning

Gestures have been found to be helpful to people in many cognitive and daily activities, such as speaking, counting, learning, and problem solving. However, different gestures benefit people to different degrees, and people use gestures in different ways to assist thinking and learning. From an embodied cognition perspective, gesture is seen as a simulated action. Therefore, to further understand the mechanisms of gesture’s effects on thinking will directly help us harness embodied cognition theories to guide teaching and learning. In the literature, it is widely known that gesture not only reflects thinking, but also actively promotes thinking and learning. However, the mechanisms that account for gesture’s effects on cognition remained obscure to us. To better understand how different types of gestures benefit thinking and learning, Study 1 was conducted with 31 participants to investigate how teaching big (n=15) and small gestures (n=16) as a problem solving strategy influenced the actual gesture use and performance. The results suggested that the small gesture might possibly be a more effective gesture, because people who were taught small and used small gestures had the highest accuracy percentage on the primary task. However, using the small gesture did not significantly lower cognitive load compared to using the big gesture. Based on these findings, Study 2 was conducted with 100 adults to further investigate how teaching different types of gestures influenced learners’ gesture use, performance, learning, and cognitive load. In this study, the participants were randomly assigned to three groups, where they were taught to solve a molecular structure problem using small (n=25), big (n=50), or no gestures (n=25). Then they were left in a quiet room to solve 15 molecule questions independently. Their answers and time spent on each question were recorded. A dual-task paradigm was used as an objective measure of cognitive load, and a NASA Questionnaire was used as a subjective measure of cognitive load. At the end, participants were asked to answer some transfer questions. Throughout the study, all participants’ gestures and body movements were recorded by two cameras. The findings from the two studies suggested that teaching different types of gestures had some influence on people’s gesture use, performance, learning, and cognitive load. Specifically, small gestures taught as a problem-solving strategy were adopted more easily and more effectively used than big gestures and body movements. Questions that were answered through small gestures seemed to have a slightly higher accuracy percentage, but were not necessarily related to lowered cognitive load. The study also found that when people were taught gesture as a problem solving strategy and then asked to use it, they took some time at the very beginning to try and practice, and then gradually transitioned to using no gestures. In both studies, their thinking time, gesture time, gesturing density decreased gradually, without sacrificing accuracy. These findings contributed to both embodied cognition theories and gesture literature, and also shed light on instructional design in an educational setting

Watch your step children! learning two-digit numbers through mirror-based observation of self-initiated body movements

It was investigated whether task-related body movements yield beneficial effects on children’s learning of two-digit numbers and whether these learning effects are affected by mirror-based self-observation of those movements. Participants were 118 first-graders, who were randomly assigned to two movement conditions and two nonmovement control conditions. In the movement conditions, children were instructed to build two-digit numbers by making and simultaneously verbalizing out loud different sized steps representing the smaller units the numbers consisted of (e.g., the number “B36” was construed by saying out loud “B10,” “B20”, “B30,” “B35,” “B36,” while making three big steps, one medium, and one small step) on a ruler across the floor. In one of the movement conditions, the children were additionally asked to observe their steps in a mirror. In the first conventionally taught control condition, the children were asked to verbally build and mark the two-digit numbers on a ruler depicted on a sheet of paper. In the second control condition, children were seated before the ruler across the floor, and after verbally constructing the two-digit number, they had to walk to the appropriate position of the number on the ruler across the floor. In the subsequent test phase, children’s knowledge of two-digit numbers was assessed by a final math test. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the movement conditions lead to higher test performance than the non-movement condition and revealed that test performance was not differentially affected by mirror-based self-observation

Matjarr Djuyal : how using gesture in teaching Gathang helps preschoolers learn nouns

There are important efforts being made to revitalise Aboriginal languages in Australia, which are both pedagogically and culturally appropriate. This research seeks to expand the current knowledge of the effectiveness of gesturing as a teaching strategy for young children learning the Gathang language. An experimental method was used to investigate the effectiveness of gesture by employing a context in which other variables (e.g., other teaching pedagogies) could be held constant. Participants, age range 4–5.2 years, were taught Gathang nouns with gesture and without gesture, alongside verbal and pictorial instruction. After the teaching sessions, each child was assessed for their receptive and expressive knowledge of the Gathang nouns, at two time points, two days after instruction (post-test 1) and one week after (post-test 2). At post-test 2, children had stronger receptive knowledge for words they had learned with gesture than without. These findings contribute to a growing body of research attesting to the effectiveness of gesture for improving knowledge acquisition amongst learners. In the context of Aboriginal language revitalisation, gesture also aligns with traditional teaching practices and offers a relatively low-cost strategy for helping teachers assist their students in acquiring Aboriginal languages