Abstract
Gesturing has been shown to relay benefits to speakers and listeners alike. Speakers, for instance, may be able to reduce their working memory load through gesture. Studies with children and adults have demonstrated that gesturing while describing how to solve a problem can help to save cognitive resources related to that explanation, allowing them to be allocated to a secondary task. The majority of research in this area focuses on procedural mathematical problem solving; however, the present study examines how gesture interacts with working memory load during a verbal reasoning task: verbal analogies. Unlike previous findings which report improved performance on secondary tasks while gesturing during a primary task, our results show that participants showed better performance in a secondary memory task when being prohibited from gesturing during their explanation of verbal analogies compared to being allowed to gesture. These results suggest that the relationship between gesture and working memory may be more nuanced, with the type of task and gestures produced influencing how gestures interact with working memory load.
Highlights
People spontaneously produce hand movements, gestures, alongside speech
These results demonstrate a reversal in previous findings (e.g., Goldin-Meadow et al, 2001; Wagner et al, 2004; Cook et al, 2012) – producing gestures resulted in worse performance on the secondary memory task than being prohibited from gesturing
Gesturing during explanations has previously been shown to alleviate working memory load (Goldin-Meadow et al, 2001; Wagner et al, 2004; Cook et al, 2012). These studies have used dual-task paradigms to show that when individuals gesture during an explanation task their performance on a secondary memory task is enhanced compared to explaining without using gestures
Summary
People spontaneously produce hand movements, gestures, alongside speech. The use of gesture is cross-cultural and individuals from different backgrounds produce gestures tied to their cultural and linguistic heritage (Kendon, 1995; Kita, 2009). Gesturing while speaking has been found to facilitate problem solving (Cook and Tanenhaus, 2009; Beilock and Goldin-Meadow, 2010; Chu and Kita, 2011; Eielts et al, 2018), learning and memory (Stevanoni and Salmon, 2005; Broaders et al, 2007; Goldin-Meadow et al, 2009; Stieff et al, 2016), and speech production and organization (Graham and Heywood, 1975; Rauscher et al, 1996; Morsella and Krauss, 2004; Hostetter et al, 2007; Jenkins et al, 2017). Some have suggested that the beneficial effects of gesture on problem solving and learning are related to how gesture can assist in managing working memory load (Goldin-Meadow and Wagner, 2005; Goldin-Meadow, 2011)
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