Abstract
Gestures are often considered to be demonstrative of the embodied nature of the mind (Hostetter and Alibali, 2008). In this article, we review current theories and research targeted at the intra-cognitive role of gestures. We ask the question how can gestures support internal cognitive processes of the gesturer? We suggest that extant theories are in a sense disembodied, because they focus solely on embodiment in terms of the sensorimotor neural precursors of gestures. As a result, current theories on the intra-cognitive role of gestures are lacking in explanatory scope to address how gestures-as-bodily-acts fulfill a cognitive function. On the basis of recent theoretical appeals that focus on the possibly embedded/extended cognitive role of gestures (Clark, 2013), we suggest that gestures are external physical tools of the cognitive system that replace and support otherwise solely internal cognitive processes. That is gestures provide the cognitive system with a stable external physical and visual presence that can provide means to think with. We show that there is a considerable amount of overlap between the way the human cognitive system has been found to use its environment, and how gestures are used during cognitive processes. Lastly, we provide several suggestions of how to investigate the embedded/extended perspective of the cognitive function of gestures.
Highlights
All the accounts we have addressed here claim that gestures fulfill a cognitive function, we have shown that in these accounts, this claim often does not refer to gestures, but rather to their neural precursors
There are accounts that suggest that gestures fulfill the cognitive role of priming or activating internal action representations (e.g., Krauss et al, 2000; Goldin-Meadow and Beilock, 2010), yet we think the reason why bodily movements fulfill this function is not clearly stated and seems to differ from the embedded/extended cognitive function we have identified here
We have tried to analyze the cognitive functions of gestures, by integrating the literature of embedded/extended cognition with the gesture literature
Summary
Several perspectives on gesticulation (e.g., McNeill, 1992; Kita, 2000; Wesp et al, 2001) have abandoned the view that gestures are merely communicative tools that are elicited after central cognitive processes (e.g., lexical retrieval, conceptualization) have taken place (Graham and Argyle, 1975; Kendon, 1994). Instead, in these perspectives the motor-system has been upgraded from a mere output system to a constitutive system for (some of the) central processes underlying thought and speech production. This resonates well with a wider movement in embodied cognitive science (Wilson, 2002; Shapiro, 2010) in which mental representations are thought to be multimodal (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Svensson, 2007) and coupled to the body’s current state (Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002)
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