Exploring Individual Differences: A Case for Measuring Children's Spontaneous Gesture Production as a Predictor of Learning From Gesture Instruction.

Decades of research have established that learners benefit when instruction includes hand gestures. This benefit is seen when learners watch an instructor gesture, as well as when they are taught or encouraged to gesture themselves. However, there is substantial individual variability with respect to this phenomenon-not all individuals benefit equally from gesture instruction. In the current paper, we explore the sources of this variability. First, we review the existing research on individual differences that do or do not predict learning from gesture instruction, including differences that are either context-dependent (linked to the particular task at hand) or context-independent (linked to the learner across multiple tasks). Next, we focus on one understudied measure of individual difference: the learner's own spontaneous gesture rate. We present data showing rates of "non-gesturers" across a number of studies and we provide theoretical motivation for why this is a fruitful area for future research. We end by suggesting ways in which research on individual differences will help gesture researchers to further refine existing theories and develop specific predictions about targeted gesture intervention for all kinds of learners.

Why do children struggle on analogical reasoning tasks? Considering the role of problem format by measuring visual attention.

Given the importance of analogical reasoning to bootstrapping children's understanding of the world, why is this ability so challenging for children? Two common sources of error have been implicated: 1) children's inability to prioritize relational information during initial problem solving; 2) children's inability to disengage from salient distractors. Here, we use eye tracking to examine children and adults' looking patterns when solving scene analogies, finding that children and adults attended differently to distractors, and that this attention predicted performance. These results provide the most direct evidence to date that feature based distraction is an important way children and adults differ during early analogical reasoning. In contrast to recent work using propositional analogies, we find no differences in children and adults' prioritization of relational information during problem solving, and while there are some differences in general attentional strategies across age groups, neither prioritization of relational information nor attentional strategy predict successful problem solving. Together, our results suggest that analogy problem format should be taken into account when considering developmental factors in children's analogical reasoning.

Children integrate speech and gesture across a wider temporal window than speech and action when learning a math concept.

It is well established that gesture facilitates learning, but understanding the best way to harness gesture and how gesture helps learners are still open questions. Here, we consider one of the properties that may make gesture a powerful teaching tool: its temporal alignment with spoken language. Previous work shows that the simultaneity of speech and gesture matters when children receive instruction from a teacher (Congdon et al., 2017). In Study 1, we ask whether simultaneity also matters when children themselves are the ones who produce speech and gesture strategies. Third-graders (N = 75) were taught to produce one strategy in speech and one strategy in gesture for correctly solving mathematical equivalence problems; they were told to produce these strategies either simultaneously (S + G) or sequentially (S➔G; G➔S) during a training session. Learning was assessed immediately after training, at a 24-h follow-up, and at a 4-week follow-up. Children showed evidence of learning and retention across all three conditions. Study 2 was conducted to explore whether it was the special relationship between speech and gesture that helped children learn. Third-graders (N = 87) were taught an action strategy instead of a gesture strategy; all other aspects of the design were the same. Children again learned across all three conditions. But only children who produced simultaneous speech and action retained what they had learned at the follow-up sessions. Results have implications for why gesture is beneficial to learners and, taken in relation to previous literature, reveal differences in the mechanisms by which doing versus seeing gesture facilitates learning.

Individual differences in gesture interpretation predict children's propensity to pick a gesturer as a good informant.

To learn from others, children rely on cues (e.g., familiarity, confidence) to infer who around them will provide useful information. We extended this research to ask whether children will use an informant's inclination to gesture as a marker of whether or not the informant is a good person to learn from. Children (N = 459, ages 4-12 years) watched short videos in which actresses made statements accompanied by meaningful iconic gestures, beat gestures (which act as prosodic markers with speech), or no gestures. After each trial, children were asked "Who do you think would be a good teacher?" (good teacher [experimental] condition) or "Who do you think would be a good friend?" (good friend [control] condition). Results show that children do believe that someone who produces iconic gesture would make a good teacher compared with someone who does not, but this is only later in childhood and only if children have the propensity to see gesture as meaningful. The same effects were not found in the good friend condition, indicating that children's responses are not just about liking an adult who gestures more. These findings have implications for how children attend to and learn from instructional gesture.

Teaching Analogical Reasoning With Co-speech Gesture Shows Children Where to Look, but Only Boosts Learning for Some.

In general, we know that gesture accompanying spoken instruction can help children learn. The present study was conducted to better understand how gesture can support children's comprehension of spoken instruction and whether the benefit of teaching though speech and gesture over spoken instruction alone depends on differences in cognitive profile - prior knowledge children have that is related to a to-be-learned concept. To answer this question, we explored the impact of gesture instruction on children's analogical reasoning ability. Children between the ages of 4 and 11 years solved scene analogy problems before and after speech alone or speech and gesture instruction while their visual attention was monitored. Our behavioral results suggest a marginal benefit of gesture instruction over speech alone, but only 5-year-old children showed a distinct advantage from speech + gesture instruction when solving the post-instruction trial, suggesting that at this age, children have the cognitive profile in place to utilize the added support of gesture. Furthermore, while speech + gesture instruction facilitated effective visual attention during instruction, directing attention away from featural matches and toward relational information was pivotal for younger children's success post instruction. We consider how these results contribute to the gesture-for-learning literature and consider how the nuanced impact of gesture is informative for educators teaching tasks of analogy in the classroom.

Learning From Gesture and Action: An Investigation of Memory for Where Objects Went and How They Got There.

Speakers often use gesture to demonstrate how to perform actions-for example, they might show how to open the top of a jar by making a twisting motion above the jar. Yet it is unclear whether listeners learn as much from seeing such gestures as they learn from seeing actions that physically change the position of objects (i.e., actually opening the jar). Here, we examined participants' implicit and explicit understanding about a series of movements that demonstrated how to move a set of objects. The movements were either shown with actions that physically relocated each object or with gestures that represented the relocation without touching the objects. Further, the end location that was indicated for each object covaried with whether the object was grasped with one or two hands. We found that memory for the end location of each object was better after seeing the physical relocation of the objects, that is, after seeing action, than after seeing gesture, regardless of whether speech was absent (Experiment 1) or present (Experiment 2). However, gesture and action built similar implicit understanding of how a particular handgrasp corresponded with a particular end location. Although gestures miss the benefit of showing the end state of objects that have been acted upon, the data show that gestures are as good as action in building knowledge of how to perform an action.

Learning math by hand: The neural effects of gesture-based instruction in 8-year-old children.

Producing gesture can be a powerful tool for facilitating learning. This effect has been replicated across a variety of academic domains, including algebra, chemistry, geometry, and word learning. Yet the mechanisms underlying the effect are poorly understood. Here we address this gap using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We examine the neural correlates underlying how children solve mathematical equivalence problems learned with the help of either a speech + gesture strategy, or a speech-alone strategy. Children who learned through a speech + gesture were more likely to recruit motor regions when subsequently solving problems during a scan than children who learned through speech alone. This suggests that gesture promotes learning, at least in part, because it is a type of action. In an exploratory analysis, we also found that children who learned through speech + gesture showed subthreshold activation in regions outside the typical action-learning network, corroborating behavioral findings suggesting that the mechanisms supporting learning through gesture and action are not identical. This study is one of the first to explore the neural mechanisms of learning through gesture.

Breaking down gesture and action in mental rotation: Understanding the components of movement that promote learning.

Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience-physically rotating objects-or gesture experience-showing how objects could rotate (e.g., Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Levine, Goldin-Meadow, Carlson, & Hemani-Lopez, 2018). These two types of movements both involve rotation, but differ on a number of components. Here, we break down action and gesture into components-feeling an object during rotation, using a grasping handshape during rotation, tracing the trajectory of rotation, and seeing the outcome of rotation-and ask, in two studies, how training children on a mental rotation task through different combinations of these components impacts learning gains across a delay. Our results extend the literature by showing that, although all children benefit from training experiences, some training experiences are more beneficial than others, and the pattern differs by sex. Not seeing the outcome of rotation emerged as a crucial training component for both males and females. However, not seeing the outcome turned out to be the only necessary component for males (who showed equivalent gains when imagining or gesturing object rotation). Females, in contrast, only benefitted from not seeing the outcome when it involved producing a relevant motor movement (i.e., when gesturing the rotation of the object and not simply imagining the rotation of the object). Results are discussed in relation to potential mechanisms driving these effects and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Gesture for generalization: gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects.

Verb learning is difficult for children (Gentner, ), partially because children have a bias to associate a novel verb not only with the action it represents, but also with the object on which it is learned (Kersten & Smith, ). Here we investigate how well 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 48) generalize novel verbs for actions on objects after doing or seeing the action (e.g., twisting a knob on an object) or after doing or seeing a gesture for the action (e.g., twisting in the air near an object). We find not only that children generalize more effectively through gesture experience, but also that this ability to generalize persists after a 24-hour delay.

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

Gestures, hand movements that accompany speech, affect children's 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.

What makes a movement a gesture?

Theories of how adults interpret the actions of others have focused on the goals and intentions of actors engaged in object-directed actions. Recent research has challenged this assumption, and shown that movements are often interpreted as being for their own sake (Schachner & Carey, 2013). Here we postulate a third interpretation of movement-movement that represents action, but does not literally act on objects in the world. These movements are gestures. In this paper, we describe a framework for predicting when movements are likely to be seen as representations. In Study 1, adults described one of three scenes: (1) an actor moving objects, (2) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them) or (3) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants systematically described the movements as depicting an object-directed action when the actor moved objects, and favored describing the movements as depicting movement for its own sake when the actor produced the same movements in the absence of objects. However, participants favored describing the movements as representations when the actor produced the movements near, but not on, the objects. Study 2 explored two additional features-the form of an actor's hands and the presence of speech-like sounds-to test the effect of context on observers' classification of movement as representational. When movements are seen as representations, they have the power to influence communication, learning, and cognition in ways that movement for its own sake does not. By incorporating representational gesture into our framework for movement analysis, we take an important step towards developing a more cohesive understanding of action-interpretation.

Effects of learning with gesture on children's understanding of a new language concept.

Asking children to gesture while being taught a concept facilitates their learning. Here, we investigated whether children benefitted equally from producing gestures that reflected speech (speech-gesture matches) versus gestures that complemented speech (speech-gesture mismatches), when learning the concept of palindromes. As in previous studies, we compared the utility of each gesture strategy to a speech alone strategy. Because our task was heavily based on language ability, we also considered children's phonological competency as a predictor of success at posttest. Across conditions, children who had low phonological competence were equally likely to perform well at posttest. However, gesture use was predictive of learning for children with high phonological competence: Those who produced either gesture strategy during training were more likely to learn than children who used a speech alone strategy. These results suggest that educators should be encouraged to use either speech-gesture match or mismatch strategies to aid learners, but that gesture may be especially beneficial to children who possess basic skills related to the new concept, in this case, phonological competency. Results also suggest that there are differences between the cognitive effects of naturally produced speech-gesture matches and mismatches, and those that are scripted and taught to children.

Neural correlates of gesture processing across human development.

Co-speech gesture facilitates learning to a greater degree in children than in adults, suggesting that the mechanisms underlying the processing of co-speech gesture differ as a function of development. We suggest that this may be partially due to children's lack of experience producing gesture, leading to differences in the recruitment of sensorimotor networks when comparing adults to children. Here, we investigated the neural substrates of gesture processing in a cross-sectional sample of 5-, 7.5-, and 10-year-old children and adults and focused on relative recruitment of a sensorimotor system that included the precentral gyrus (PCG) and the posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG). Children and adults were presented with videos in which communication occurred through different combinations of speech and gesture during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session. Results demonstrated that the PCG and pMTG were recruited to different extents in the two populations. We interpret these novel findings as supporting the idea that gesture perception (pMTG) is affected by a history of gesture production (PCG), revealing the importance of considering gesture processing as a sensorimotor process.

EFFECTS OF SENSORI-MOTOR LEARNING ON MELODY PROCESSING ACROSS DEVELOPMENT.

Actions influence perceptions, but how this occurs may change across the lifespan. Studies have investigated how object-directed actions (e.g., learning about objects through manipulation) affect subsequent perception, but how abstract actions affect perception, and how this may change across development, have not been well studied. In the present study, we address this question, teaching children (4-7 year-olds) and adults sung melodies, with or without an abstract motor component, and using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to determine how these melodies are subsequently processed. Results demonstrated developmental change in the motor cortices and Middle Temporal Gyrus. Results have implications for understanding sensori-motor integration in the developing brain, and may provide insight into motor learning use in some music education techniques.