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

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

Perceiving Movement as Representational Across the Lifespan

It is well established that gestures, the hand movements that accompany speech are an integral part of communication, ubiquitous across cultures, and a unique feature of human behavior (e.g., Goldin-Meadow & Brentari, in press). However, until now, no one has asked how listeners know when hand movements are supposed to be gestures, and not some other class of movement, such as instrumental actions, or meaningless movements produced for the sake of movement (e.g., Schachner & Carey, 2013). In this dissertation, I will explore what features of an event lead observers to see movement as gesture, and how seeing gesture changes across ontogeny. I begin by reviewing the previous literature on the role of gesture in learning and discuss a framework for understanding the functions of gesture on cognitive processes. I will then present three studies exploring how humans, across the lifespan, come to see and categorize hand movements. In Chapter 1, I will explore the features of movement that lead adults to interpret it as representational (as opposed to meaningless movement in the air, or instrumental actions-on-objects). Chapter 2 will investigate the development of movement categorization in childhood (ages 4-9). Chapter 3 will ask how infants first begin to categorize movements, and whether a system for categorizing hand movements is in place in infancy. Finally, I will integrate the findings from these studies into the broader question of how seeing movement as gesture affects learning from gesture

Novel labels modify visual attention in 2-year-old children

Labeling objects enhances fundamental cognitive capacities like categorization, individuation, and memory in young chil-dren. However, the mechanism by which labels support these cognitive processes remains unknown. One possibility isthat providing a label for an object changes childrens online visual processing of that object. To address this, we consid-ered several indices of visual attention, asking whether 2-year-old children attend to an object differently if it is labeled(Look at the dax) than if it is paired with a non-labeling phrase (Look at that). We find that 2-year-old childrens visualfixations are longer when objects are paired with a labeling phrase, rather than a non-labeling phrase. Indeed, after hearinga label, children showed a sustained increase in fixation duration. However, the number of fixations children made did notchange as a function of labeling. This illustrates an attentional mechanism by which language might enhance learning in2-year-old children