There is More to Gesture Than Meets the Eye: Visual Attention to Gesture’s Referents Cannot Account for Its Facilitative Effects During Math Instruction

Teaching a new concept with gestures – hand movements that accompany speech – facilitates learning above-and-beyond instruction through speech alone (e.g., Singer & GoldinMeadow, 2005). However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still being explored. Here, we use eye tracking to explore one mechanism – gesture’s ability to direct visual attention. We examine how children allocate their visual attention during a mathematical equivalence lesson that either contains gesture or does not. We show that gesture instruction improves posttest performance, and additionally that gesture does change how children visually attend to instruction: children look more to the problem being explained, and less to the instructor. However looking patterns alone cannot explain gesture’s effect, as posttest performance is not predicted by any of our looking-time measures. These findings suggest that gesture does guide visual attention, but that attention alone cannot account for its facilitative learning effects

Infants’ experience-dependent processing of male and female faces: Insights from eye tracking and event-related potentials

The goal of the present study was to investigate infants' processing of female and male faces. We used an event-related potential (ERP) priming task, as well as a visual-paired comparison (VPC) eye tracking task to explore how 7-month-old "female expert" infants differed in their responses to faces of different genders. Female faces elicited larger N290 amplitudes than male faces. Furthermore, infants showed a priming effect for female faces only, whereby the N290 was significantly more negative for novel females compared to primed female faces. The VPC experiment was designed to test whether infants could reliably discriminate between two female and two male faces. Analyses showed that infants were able to differentiate faces of both genders. The results of the present study suggest that 7-month olds with a large amount of female face experience show a processing advantage for forming a neural representation of female faces, compared to male faces. However, the enhanced neural sensitivity to the repetition of female faces is not due to the infants' inability to discriminate male faces. Instead, the combination of results from the two tasks suggests that the differential processing for female faces may be a signature of expert-level processing

Genome-wide association meta-analysis in 269,867 individuals identifies new genetic and functional links to intelligence

Intelligence is highly heritable(1) and a major determinant of human health and well-being(2). Recent genome-wide meta-analyses have identified 24 genomic loci linked to variation in intelligence3-7, but much about its genetic underpinnings remains to be discovered. Here, we present a large-scale genetic association study of intelligence (n = 269,867), identifying 205 associated genomic loci (190 new) and 1,016 genes (939 new) via positional mapping, expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping, chromatin interaction mapping, and gene-based association analysis. We find enrichment of genetic effects in conserved and coding regions and associations with 146 nonsynonymous exonic variants. Associated genes are strongly expressed in the brain, specifically in striatal medium spiny neurons and hippocampal pyramidal neurons. Gene set analyses implicate pathways related to nervous system development and synaptic structure. We confirm previous strong genetic correlations with multiple health-related outcomes, and Mendelian randomization analysis results suggest protective effects of intelligence for Alzheimer's disease and ADHD and bidirectional causation with pleiotropic effects for schizophrenia. These results are a major step forward in understanding the neurobiology of cognitive function as well as genetically related neurological and psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Author Correction:Study of 300,486 individuals identifies 148 independent genetic loci influencing general cognitive function

Christina M. Lill, who contributed to analysis of data, was inadvertently omitted from the author list in the originally published version of this article. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article

Unlocking the Power of Gesture: Using Movement-Based Instruction to Improve First Grade Children’s Spatial Unit Misconceptions

Gestures are hand movements that are produced simultaneously with spoken language and can supplement it by representing semantic information, emphasizing important points, or showing spatial locations and relations. Gestures’ specific features make them a promising tool to improve spatial thinking. Yet, there is recent work showing that not all learners benefit equally from gesture instruction and that this may be driven, in part, by children’s difficulty understanding what an instructor’s gesture is intended to represent. The current study directly compares instruction with gestures to instruction with plastic unit chips (Action) in a linear measurement learning paradigm aimed at teaching children the concept of spatial units. Some children performed only one type of movement, and some children performed both: Action-then-Gesture [AG] or Gesture-then-Action [GA]. Children learned most from the Gesture-then-Action [GA] and Action only [A] training conditions. After controlling for initial differences in learning, the gesture-then-action condition outperformed all three other training conditions on a transfer task. While gesture is cognitively challenging for some learners, that challenge may be desirable—immediately following gesture with a concrete representation to clarify that gesture’s meaning is an especially effective way to unlock the power of this spatial tool and lead to deep, generalizable learning

Learning to measure through action and gesture: Children's prior knowledge matters

Learning through physical action with mathematical manipulatives is an effective way to help children acquire new ideas and concepts. Gesture is a type of physical action, but it differs from other kinds of actions in that it does not involve interacting directly with external objects. As such, gesture provides an interesting comparison to action-on-objects and allows us to identify the circumstances under which gesture versus interaction with objects (and the associated effects on the external world) may be differentially beneficial to learning. In the current study, we ask whether individual differences in first grade children's prior knowledge about a foundational mathematical concept - their understanding of linear units of measure - might interact with their ability to glean insight from action- and gesture-based instruction. We find that the children using a more rudimentary pretest strategy did not benefit from producing gestures at all, but did benefit from producing actions. In contrast, children using a more conceptually advanced, though still incorrect, strategy at pretest learned from both actions and gestures. This interaction between conceptual knowledge and movement type (action or gesture) emphasizes the importance of considering individual differences in children's prior knowledge when assessing the efficacy of movement-based instruction. © 2018 Elsevier B.

Infants’ experience-dependent processing of male and female faces: Insights from eye tracking and event-related potentials

The goal of the present study was to investigate infants’ processing of female and male faces. We used an event-related potential (ERP) priming task, as well as a visual-paired comparison (VPC) eye tracking task to explore how 7-month-old “female expert” infants differed in their responses to faces of different genders. Female faces elicited larger N290 amplitudes than male faces. Furthermore, infants showed a priming effect for female faces only, whereby the N290 was significantly more negative for novel females compared to primed female faces. The VPC experiment was designed to test whether infants could reliably discriminate between two female and two male faces. Analyses showed that infants were able to differentiate faces of both genders. The results of the present study suggest that 7-month olds with a large amount of female face experience show a processing advantage for forming a neural representation of female faces, compared to male faces. However, the enhanced neural sensitivity to the repetition of female faces is not due to the infants’ inability to discriminate male faces. Instead, the combination of results from the two tasks suggests that the differential processing for female faces may be a signature of expert-level processing

Resilience in mathematics after early brain injury: The roles of parental input and early plasticity

Children with early focal unilateral brain injury show remarkable plasticity in language development. However, little is known about how early brain injury influences mathematical learning. Here, we examine early number understanding, comparing cardinal number knowledge of typically developing children (TD) and children with pre- and perinatal lesions (BI) between 42 and 50 months of age. We also examine how this knowledge relates to the number words children hear from their primary caregivers early in life. We find that children with BI, are, on average, slightly behind TD children in both cardinal number knowledge and later mathematical performance, and show slightly slower learning rates than TD children in cardinal number knowledge during the preschool years. We also find that parents’ “number talk” to their toddlers predicts later mathematical ability for both TD children and children with BI. These findings suggest a relatively optimistic story in which neural plasticity is at play in children’s mathematical development following early brain injury. Further, the effects of early number input suggest that intervening to enrich the number talk that children with BI hear during the preschool years could narrow the math achievement gap. Keywords: Plasticity, Early unilateral brain injury, Mathematical skill, Cardinality, Parent inpu

The Impact of Gesture and Prior Knowledge on Visual Attention During Math Instruction

Inclusion of gesture – meaningful movements of the hands –during mathematics instruction is beneficial for teachingnaïve learners novel concepts, and it can affect a learner’sallocation of visual attention. Yet, it is unknown how childrenwith pre-existing knowledge of a math concept approachinstruction that includes gesture. Here, we examine howchildren’s prior knowledge and either the presence or absenceof gesture during instruction drive patterns in visual attentionduring a lesson. We find that prior knowledge does determinevisual attention patterns, independent of type of instruction(i.e. with or without gesture). These findings further ourunderstanding of the attentional mechanisms of gesture andhave implications for real-world classrooms, where levels ofprior knowledge are often mixed