Spatial analogies pervade complex relational reasoning: Evidence from spontaneous gestures.

Kensy Cooperrider,Dedre Gentner,Susan Goldin-Meadow

doi:10.1186/s41235-016-0024-5

Abstract

How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining spontaneous gestures. In two studies, participants read a written lesson describing positive and negative feedback systems and then explained the differences between them. Though the lesson was highly abstract and people were not instructed to gesture, people produced spatial gestures in abundance during their explanations. These gestures used space to represent simple abstract relations (e.g., increase) and sometimes more complex relational structures (e.g., negative feedback). Moreover, over the course of their explanations, participants’ gestures often cohered into larger analogical models of relational structure. Importantly, the spatial ideas evident in the hands were largely unaccompanied by spatial words. Gesture thus suggests that spatial analogies are pervasive in complex relational reasoning, even when language does not.

Highlights

How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining spontaneous gestures
University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article located different elements of the system in different parts of space, showed causal relationships as movements between locations, and modeled the overall behavior of the systems with complex movements. Most of these spatial gestures were produced without spatial words. These findings suggest that spatial analogies may be a pervasive part of people’s on-the-fly reasoning about complex relational systems, and, further, that gesture may be an important medium through which such analogies are expressed
It has been noted that the spatial information revealed in people’s abstract gestures sometimes goes beyond what is found in the language co-produced with those gestures (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Cienki, 1998). We explore this spatial analogy hypothesis by having people read a lesson about two types of complex relational systems—positive and negative feedback—and explain the key differences between them

Summary

Introduction

How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining spontaneous gestures. We investigate the possibility that people reason about such causal patterns in part by using spatial analogies—that is, spatial models of the relations involved To investigate this possibility, we had people explain the differences between positive and negative feedback systems and examined their gestures. One line of evidence for the visuospatial character of these models is that, when reasoning about or explaining such systems, people often produce diagrams (Forbus, Usher, Lovett, & Wetzel, 2011; Novick, 2001; Tversky, 2011) or gestures (e.g., Kang, Tversky, & Black, 2014; Nathan & Martinez, 2015; Schwartz & Black, 1996) Based on such observations, it seems plausible that people develop spatial mental models of other types of complex systems, such as the causal patterns under consideration here. It might seem unhelpful, or even counterproductive, to recruit visuospatial reasoning processes when thinking about such pure abstractions

Results

Discussion

Conclusion