Assessing knowledge conveyed in gesture: Do teachers have the upper hand?

Children's gestures can reveal important information about their problem-solving strategies. This study investigated whether the information children express only in gesture is accessible to adults not trained in gesture coding. Twenty teachers and 20 undergraduates viewed videotaped vignettes of 12 children explaining their solutions to equations. Six children expressed the same strategy in speech and gesture, and 6 expressed different strategies. After each vignette, adults described the child's reasoning. For children who expressed different strategies in speech and gesture, both teachers and undergraduates frequently described strategies that children had not expressed in speech. These additional strategies could often be traced to the children's gestures. Sensitivity to gesture was comparable for teachers and undergraduates. Thus, even without training, adults glean information, not only from children's words but also from their hands

Unpacking the Ontogeny of Gesture Understanding: How Movement Becomes Meaningful Across Development

Gestures, hand movements that accompany speech, affect children\u27s learning, memory, and thinking (e.g., Goldin‐Meadow, 2003). However, it remains unknown how children distinguish gestures from other kinds of actions. In this study, 4‐ to 9‐year‐olds (n = 339) and adults (n = 50) described one of three scenes: (a) an actor moving objects, (b) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them), or (c) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants across all ages were equally able to identify actions on objects as goal directed, but the ability to identify empty‐handed movements as representational actions (i.e., as gestures) increased with age and was influenced by the presence of objects, especially in older children

Gesture analysis for physics education researchers

Systematic observations of student gestures can not only fill in gaps in students' verbal expressions, but can also offer valuable information about student ideas, including their source, their novelty to the speaker, and their construction in real time. This paper provides a review of the research in gesture analysis that is most relevant to physics education researchers and illustrates gesture analysis for the purpose of better understanding student thinking about physics.Comment: 14 page

2014 Dahlberg Award Winner: The effects of dietary toughness on occlusopalatal variation in savanna baboons

This study investigates the relationship between dietary toughness and craniofacial variation in two groups of savanna baboons. Standard craniofacial and malocclusion data were collected from a captive, soft-diet experiment group (n=24) and a sample of wild-captured baboons, raised on tougher, natural foods (n=19). We tested the hypothesis that in the absence of normal masticatory stress experienced during the consumption of wild foods, the captive baboons would exhibit higher levels of facial and dental structural irregularities. Principal component analysis indicates separation of the two samples. The soft-diet sample exhibits significantly shorter palates, greater variability in palate position, and higher frequencies of occlusal irregularities that correlate with the shorter palates. Results offer further support that long-term dietary chewing stresses have a measurable effect on adult craniofacial variation

From principles to action: Applying the National Research Council's principles for effective decision support to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's watch office

AbstractThe National Research Council (NRC) proposed six principles for effective decision support in its 2009 report Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate. We structured a collaborative project between the Federal Emergency Management Agency Region R9 (FEMA R9), the Western Region Headquarters of the National Weather Service (WR-NWS), and the Climate Assessment of the Southwest (CLIMAS) at the University of Arizona around the application of the NRC principles. The goal of the project was to provide FEMA R9's Watch Office with climate information scaled to their temporal and spatial interests to aid them in assessing the potential risk of flood disasters. We found that we needed specific strategies and activities in order to apply the principles effectively. By using a set of established collaborative research approaches we were better able to assess FEMA R9's information needs and WR-NWS's capacity to meet those needs. Despite our diligent planning of engagement strategies, we still encountered some barriers to transitioning our decision support tool from research to operations. This paper describes our methods for planning and executing a three-party collaborative effort to provide climate services, the decision support tool developed through this process, and the lessons we will take from this deliberate collaborative process to our future work and implications of the NRC principles for the broader field of climate services

Representational Gesture as a Tool for Promoting Verb Learning in Young Children

The movements we produce or observe others produce can help us learn. Two forms of movement that are commonplace in our daily lives are actions, hand movements that directly manipulate our environment, and gestures, hand movements that accompany speech and represent ideas but do not lead to physical changes in the environment. Both action and gesture have been found to influence cognition, facilitating our ability to learn and remember new information (e.g., Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grezes, Passingham, & Haggard, 2005; Casile & Giese, 2006; Chao & Martin, 2000; Cook, Mitchell, & GoldinMeadow, 2008; Goldin-Meadow, Cook, & Mitchell, 2009; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; James, 2010; James & Atwood, 2009; James & Gauthier, 2006; James & Maouene, 2009; James & Swain, 2011; Longcamp, Anton, Roth, & Velay, 2003; Longcamp, Tanskanen, & Hari, 2006; Pulvermüller, 2001; Wakefield & James, 2015). However, the two types of movement may affect learning in different ways. In previous work, the effects of action and gesture on learning have been considered separately (but see Novack, Congdon, Hemani-Lopez, & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). Our goal here is to directly compare children’s ability to learn from actions on objects versus gestures off objects. We consider this question in the realm of word learning, specifically, teaching children verbs for actions that are performed on objects. We also ask whether learning through these movements unfolds differently when movements are produced versus observed by a child. More broadly, our study is a first step in understanding how information is learned, generalized, and retained based on whether it is expressed through action or gesture

Cognitive demands of face monitoring: Evidence for visuospatial overload

Young children perform difficult communication tasks better face to face than when they cannot see one another (e.g., Doherty-Sneddon & Kent, 1996). However, in recent studies, it was found that children aged 6 and 10 years, describing abstract shapes, showed evidence of face-to-face interference rather than facilitation. For some communication tasks, access to visual signals (such as facial expression and eye gaze) may hinder rather than help children’s communication. In new research we have pursued this interference effect. Five studies are described with adults and 10- and 6-year-old participants. It was found that looking at a face interfered with children’s abilities to listen to descriptions of abstract shapes. Children also performed visuospatial memory tasks worse when they looked at someone’s face prior to responding than when they looked at a visuospatial pattern or at the floor. It was concluded that performance on certain tasks was hindered by monitoring another person’s face. It is suggested that processing of visual communication signals shares certain processing resources with the processing of other visuospatial information

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

A perspective on problems and prospects for academic publishing in Geography

  This commentary highlights problems of inequity in academic publishing in geography that arise from the increasing use of metrics as a measure of research quality. In so doing, we examine patterns in the ranking of geographical journals in the major global databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) and compare these with a more inclusive database developed by the International Geographical Union. The shortcomings of ranking systems are examined and are shown to include, inter alia, linguistic bias, the lack of representation of books and chapters in books , the geographical unevenness of accredited journals, problems of multi-authorship, the mismatch between ranking and social usefulness and alternative or critical thinking, as well as differences between physical and human geography. The hegemony of the global commercial publishing houses emerges as problematic for geography in particular. It is argued that the global community of geographers should continue to challenge the use of bibliometrics as a means of assessing research quality. ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby

Diverse bacterial communities live on and in human skin. These complex communities vary by skin location on the body, over time, between individuals, and between geographic regions. Culture-based studies have shown that human to human and human to surface contact mediates the dispersal of pathogens, yet little is currently known about the drivers of bacterial community assembly patterns on human skin. We hypothesized that participation in a sport involving skin to skin contact would result in detectable shifts in skin bacterial community composition. We conducted a study during a flat track roller derby tournament, and found that teammates shared distinct skin microbial communities before and after playing against another team, but that opposing teams’ bacterial communities converged during the course of a roller derby bout. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the human skin microbiome shifts in composition during activities involving human to human contact, and that contact sports provide an ideal setting in which to evaluate dispersal of microorganisms between people