Spontaneous Gestures Research Articles

Teachers' Gestures and How They Matter.

How do teachers' gestures influence students' learning? This article reviews research investigating the role of gestures in communication, focusing on teachers' communication with their students, primarily in mathematics and science instruction. We first briefly consider gesture's role in communication more generally as a backdrop for considering teaching as a special context for communication. We then describe teachers' spontaneous gesturing in teaching contexts, and we consider how teachers' spontaneous gestures might influence students' learning. We then consider experimental studies that provide causal support for the effects of teachers' gestures on students' learning. We conclude by discussing future directions and implications for educational practice.

Learners' Spontaneous Gesture Before a Math Lesson Predicts the Efficacy of Seeing Versus Doing Gesture During the Lesson.

Gestures-hand movements that accompany speech and express ideas-can help children learn how to solve problems, flexibly generalize learning to novel problem-solving contexts, and retain what they have learned. But does it matter who is doing the gesturing? We know that producing gesture leads to better comprehension of a message than watching someone else produce gesture. But we do not know how producing versus observing gesture impacts deeper learning outcomes such as generalization and retention across time. Moreover, not all children benefit equally from gesture instruction, suggesting that there are individual differences that may play a role in who learns from gesture. Here, we consider two factors that might impact whether gesture leads to learning, generalization, and retention after mathematical instruction: (1) whether children see gesture or do gesture and (2) whether a child spontaneously gestures before instruction when explaining their problem-solving reasoning. For children who spontaneously gestured before instruction, both doing and seeing gesture led to better generalization and retention of the knowledge gained than a comparison manipulative action. For children who did not spontaneously gesture before instruction, doing gesture was less effective than the comparison action for learning, generalization, and retention. Importantly, this learning deficit was specific to gesture, as these children did benefit from doing the comparison manipulative action. Our findings are the first evidence that a child's use of a particular representational format for communication (gesture) directly predicts that child's propensity to learn from using the same representational format.

So Much Depends Upon a Red Stripe

ABSTRACT The paper explores the impact of Palmer’s spontaneous gesture of a red stripe that completed his abstract painting—emotionally and aesthetically—in response to a difficult analytic relationship. The red stripe arises from his search for greater openness, emotional freedom, and creative responses to the flow of communication with his patient. The analyst’s ethical intentions are inward to be open and available to the influx of the patient’s emotional world, and outward, found in actions and gestures with the patient striving for honesty, transparency, a willingness to take risks and accept accidents in a search for emotion truth and authentically being present. The analyst inhabits, gathers, and concentrates feeling that provides a medium for feelings to live, take shape, and be recognized by an analytic function called “the aesthetic” that then fosters “aesthetic experiences”—intense passages of shared living that are transformative.

Reflexiones sobre la sexualidad y el género desde la perspectiva de D. W. Winnicott

Reflexiones sobre la sexualidad y el género desde la perspectiva de D. W. Winnicott

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.

Under the Gun of Countertransference: A Discussion of Laura D’Angelo’s “The Loaded Chamber”

What should we do when a patient brings a loaded gun into a session? In a relational psychoanalytic paradigm, it’s impossible to know in advance what the response to a moment of such intense pressure might be. An analyst’s ability to respond quickly, in a way that facilitates change, depends on adhering to asymmetrical aspects of psychoanalytic ritual while simultaneously holding that adherence dialectically with spontaneous personal participation. Deviations from ritualized aspects of the frame in the form of spontaneous gestures are what afford improvisations their special charge; how analysts make use of their countertransference can, therefore, be the key to an enactment’s potential. This paper discusses how Laura D’Angelo’s spontaneous decision to initiate an improvisation communicated her willingness to extend herself “beyond the call of duty.” In this example, the most significant aspect of the improvisation may not be so much what was being improvised as who was initiating the improvising.

Resources for reasoning of chemistry concepts: multimodal molecular geometry

Central to conceptual understanding of STEM disciplines is visuospatial processing. Despite its acknowledged role in assuring learners’ success, less is known about the underlying reasoning students must employ when solving 3-D problems and the ways in which gaining an understanding of this can inform formative assessment and learning in STEM education. Chemists must utilise their spatial understanding when visualising 3-D structures and processes from 2-D representations and so this exploratory practitioner-researcher study sought to identify the ways in which secondary school chemistry students reason when explaining their predictions about molecular geometry, and how the use of certain modalities was linked to assessed accuracy. Coding of students’ verbal and written responses to the research task revealed that students employed multiple reasoning strategies and conceptual resources to facilitate use of analytical heuristics and imagistic reasoning. Analysis of students’ verbal responses and spontaneous gestures provided insight into the extent of imagistic vs. analytical reasoning and the finer-grained conditions which promoted their use. Importantly, it was observed that despite being instructed on the use of VSEPR theory to find analytical solutions, some students exhibited preference for alternative reasoning strategies drawing upon imagistic reasoning; showing more nuanced and varying degrees of accuracy through their verbal responses and representations gestured in 3D space. This work has pedagogical implications as use of specific reasoning strategies and the identification of key conceptual resources is not readily promoted as classroom practice for learning or assessment. This study therefore raises questions and contributes to the evidence base for attending to learners’ visuospatial thinking, as revealed through the multiple modalities they may use to assist and communicate their understanding, and highlights the significance of this to formative assessment in Chemistry and STEM Education.

Gesture production at encoding supports narrative recall

Existing research is inconsistent regarding the effects of gesture production on narrative recall. Most studies have examined the effects of gesture production during a recall phase, not during encoding, and findings regarding gesture’s effects are mixed. The present study examined whether producing gestures at encoding could benefit an individual’s narrative recall and whether this effect is moderated by verbal memory and spatial ability. This study also investigated whether producing certain types of gesture is most beneficial to recalling details of a narrative. Participants read a narrative aloud while producing their own gestures at pre-specified phrases in the narrative (Instructed Gesture condition), while placing both their hands behind their backs (No Gesture condition) or with no specific instructions regarding gesture (Spontaneous Gesture condition). Participants completed measures of spatial ability and verbal memory. Recall was measured through both free recall, and specific recall questions related to particular phrases in the narrative. Spontaneous gesture production at encoding benefited free recall, while instructed gestures provided the greatest benefit for recall of specific phrases where gesture had been prompted during encoding. Conversely, for recall of specific phrases where gesture had not been prompted during encoding, instructions to either gesture or not gesture suppressed recall for those higher in verbal memory. Finally, producing iconic and deictic gestures provided benefits for narrative recall, whilst beat gestures had no effect. Gestures play an important role in how we encode and subsequently recall information, providing an opportunity to support cognitive capacity.

Esquisse pour une psychopathologie psychanalytique de l’environnement

ObjectivesThe environment is a concept that allows us to re-examine classical psychoanalytic psychopathology, starting with the nature of the symptom and the processes that structure it, then the notions of the normal and the pathological. This article thus proposes the main axes of a psychoanalytic psychopathology of the environment in an intersubjective dimension. MethodWe carry out a singular reading and analysis of Donald W. Winnicott's theories on the environment and the concepts related to it, in particular dependence, the self, aggressiveness, and repair. Then we describe their complementarities and their breaks with Anglo-Saxon theories, as developed by Sándor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, and Michael Balint. ResultsThere are different types of failures depending on whether the environment impinges affectively and bodily on the needs of the infant through seduction, torment, or disappearance. What matters is the moment of dependence during which they take place, generating either potentially a psychotic or manic-depressive organization at the moment of absolute dependence, or potentially an antisocial organization at the moment of relative dependence. The failures of the environment (Winnicott) can thus be considered complementary to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Klein), as well as to the concepts of ocnophilia and philobatism (Balint). DiscussionThe concept of environment also shows how motor skills constitute an important intersubjective experience in the construction of the self. In parents, this manifests itself above all in ordinary holding; in infants, in the aggressiveness at the origin of their spontaneous gestures, both destructive and creative, then becoming more broadly restorative in the family and social environments. Regression to dependence may become necessary for the exploration of primary experiences inherent to the individual-environment dyad, and may also have a function of intersubjective reintegration. ConclusionThis sketch for a psychoanalytic psychopathology of the environment is therefore relevant for interpreting the sufferings of the self as intersubjective “disorders” and for analyzing clinical cases of regression to dependence in the analytic situation.

Spontaneous Gestures in L2 Naturalistic Spontaneous Interaction: Effects of Language Proficiency

Gestures produced by language learners have a positive impact on interactions; however, few studies have examined natural conversation data focusing on a learner’s spoken language proficiency level. This study investigates gesture use among learners of English as a second language with varying language proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) to determine whether gesture use and type (e.g., iconic, deictic, metaphoric, and beat gestures) differ by language proficiency level. This study examined 17 video-recorded dyadic interactions in English consisting of mixed-level and same-level pairs. Quantitative analysis followed by a data-driven approach demonstrated that more advanced learners employed gestures with speech more frequently than other groups. During interactions, iconic gestures were used more often by the beginner group, while deictic gestures were employed more by the advanced group. Moreover, the function of the gestures produced by each group during the interactions appeared to be qualitatively varied. These results indicate that gesture use and type may relate to learners’ language profi ciency levels. This study has revealed significant differences in gesture use among learners of English as a second language with varying language proficiency levels, providing insights into learners’ cognition process during verbal communication.

Given-New Effects on the Duration of Gestures and of Words in Face-to-Face Dialogue

ABSTRACT The given-new contract entails that speakers must distinguish for their addressee whether references are new or already part of their dialogue. Past research had found that, in a monologue to a listener, speakers shortened repeated words. However, the notion of the given-new contract is inherently dialogic, with an addressee and the availability of co-speech gestures. Here, two face-to-face dialogue experiments tested whether gesture duration also follows the given-new contract. In Experiment 1, four experimental sequences confirmed that when speakers repeated their gestures, they shortened the duration significantly. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with spontaneous gestures in a different task. This experiment also extended earlier results with words, confirming that speakers shortened their repeated words significantly in a multimodal dialogue setting, the basic form of language use. Because words and gestures were not necessarily redundant, these results offer another instance in which gestures and words independently serve pragmatic requirements of dialogue.

Intentional gestural communication amongst red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus)

Apes, human’s closest living relatives, are renowned for their intentional and highly flexible use of gestural communication. In stark contrast, evidence for flexible and intentional gestural communication in monkeys is scarce. Here, we investigated the intentionality and flexibility of spontaneous gesture use in red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus). We applied established methods used in ape gesture research to analyse whether the body acts produced by a total of 17 individuals living in three different groups in captivity qualified as intentionally produced gesture instances. Results showed that signallers showed all hallmarks of intentionality during the production of 20 out of a total of 21 different types of body acts. These were only produced in the presence of other individuals, and the monkeys showed audience checking, sensitivity to the attentional states of recipients, adjustment of signal modality, and response waiting relative to their production. Moreover, in case of communication failure, the monkeys showed goal persistence, and regarding the production contexts they showed some signs of means–ends dissociation. Therefore, these monkeys are capable of flexible and intentional gestural communication and use this to communicate with conspecifics. Our results corroborate recent findings showing that intentional gestural communication was already present in the monkey lineage of catarrhine primates. We discuss our results in light of the comparative approach towards human language evolution and highlight our finding that these monkeys also showed flexible and intentional use of four ‘free’ manual gesture types.

Integrating Gestures and Words to Communicate in Full-Term and Low-Risk Preterm Late Talkers.

Young children use gestures to practice communicative functions that foster their receptive and expressive linguistic skills. Studies investigating the use of gestures by late talkers are limited. This study aimed to investigate the use of gestures and gesture–word combinations and their associations with word comprehension and word and sentence production in late talkers. A further purpose was to examine whether a set of individual and environmental factors accounted for interindividual differences in late talkers’ gesture and gesture–word production. Sixty-one late talkers, including 35 full-term and 26 low-risk preterm children, participated in the study. Parents filled out the Italian short forms of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB–CDI), “Gesture and Words” and “Words and Sentences” when their children were 30-months-old, and they were then invited to participate in a book-sharing session with their child. Children’s gestures and words produced during the book-sharing session were transcribed and coded into CHAT of CHILDES and analyzed with CLAN. Types of spontaneous gestures (pointing and representational gestures) and gesture–word combinations (complementary, equivalent, and supplementary) were coded. Measures of word tokens and MLU were also computed. Correlational analyses documented that children’s use of gesture–word combinations, particularly complementary and supplementary forms, in the book-sharing session was positively associated with linguistic skills both observed during the session (word tokens and MLU) and reported by parents (word comprehension, word production, and sentence production at the MB–CDI). Concerning individual factors, male gender was negatively associated with gesture and gesture–word use, as well as with MB–CDI action/gesture production. In contrast, having a low-risk preterm condition and being later-born were positively associated with the use of gestures and pointing gestures, and having a family history of language and/or learning disorders was positively associated with the use of representational gestures. Furthermore, a low-risk preterm status and a higher cognitive score were positively associated with gesture–word combinations, particularly complementary and supplementary types. With regard to environmental factors, older parental age was negatively associated with late talkers’ use of gestures and pointing gestures. Interindividual differences in late talkers’ gesture and gesture–word production were thus related to several intertwined individual and environmental factors. Among late talkers, use of gestures and gesture–word combinations represents a point of strength promoting receptive and expressive language acquisition.

Do Spoken Vocabulary and Gestural Production Distinguish Children with Transient Language Delay from Children Who Will Show Developmental Language Disorder? A Pilot Study.

The literature on the role of gestures in children with language delay (LD) is partial and controversial. The present study explores gestural production and modality of expression in children with LD and semantic and temporal relationships between gestures and words in gesture + word combinations. Thirty-three children participated (mean age, 26 months), who were recruited through a screening programme for LD. Cognitive skills, lexical abilities, and the use of spontaneous gestures in a naming task were evaluated when the children were 32 months old. When the children were 78 months old, their parents were interviewed to collect information about an eventual diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD). According to these data, the children fell into three groups: children with typical development (n = 13), children with LD who did not show DLD (transient LD; n = 9), and children with LD who showed DLD (n = 11). No significant differences emerged between the three groups for cognitive and lexical skills (comprehension and production), for number of gestures spontaneously produced, and for the sematic relationships between gestures and words. Differences emerged in the modality of expression, where children with transient LD produced more unimodal gestural utterances than typical-development children, and in the temporal relationships between gestures and words, where the children who would show DLD provided more frequent representational gestures before the spoken answer than typical-development children. We suggest a different function for gestures in children with T-LD, who used representational gestures to replace the spoken word they were not yet able to produce, and in children with LD-DLD, who used representational gestures to access spoken words.

The Processing of Semantic Complexity and Cospeech Gestures in Schizophrenia: A Naturalistic, Multimodal fMRI Study.

Schizophrenia is marked by aberrant processing of complex speech and gesture, which may contribute functionally to its impaired social communication. To date, extant neuroscientific studies of schizophrenia have largely investigated dysfunctional speech and gesture in isolation, and no prior research has examined how the two communicative channels may interact in more natural contexts. Here, we tested if patients with schizophrenia show aberrant neural processing of semantically complex story segments, and if speech-associated gestures (co-speech gestures) might modulate this effect. In a functional MRI study, we presented to 34 participants (16 patients and 18 matched-controls) an ecologically-valid retelling of a continuous story, performed via speech and spontaneous gestures. We split the entire story into ten-word segments, and measured the semantic complexity for each segment with idea density, a linguistic measure that is commonly used clinically to evaluate aberrant language dysfunction at the semantic level. Per segment, the presence of numbers of gestures varied (n = 0, 1, +2). Our results suggest that, in comparison to controls, patients showed reduced activation for more complex segments in the bilateral middle frontal and inferior parietal regions. Importantly, this neural aberrance was normalized in segments presented with gestures. Thus, for the first time with a naturalistic multimodal stimulation paradigm, we show that gestures reduced group differences when processing a natural story, probably by facilitating the processing of semantically complex segments of the story in schizophrenia.

Multimodal communication in instructional settings: An investigation of the functional roles of gestures and arrows

In daily communication and instructional settings, arrows and spontaneous gestures usually convey similar spatial information to interlocutors. They can visualize spatial information in 2D or 3D space based on shared conceptual and spatial representations. The present study investigates the relationship between spontaneous gestures and arrows from the perspective of generation and comprehension in instructional settings. We introduce a corpus of arrows in written multimodal text and a corpus of gestures generated during communication through multimodal instructional material. We also report an experimental investigation that used corpus material to study the impact of gestures on comprehension learning. A comparison of the corpora reveals functional similarities and differences between arrows and gestures and their complementary role in multimodal communication. The findings suggest that arrows and gestures may share a common conceptual space during communication, having a significant impact on comprehension and learning.

‘The Unconscious was Another Word for Inspiration’: Adam Phillips on Marion Milner

‘The Unconscious was Another Word for Inspiration’: Adam Phillips on Marion Milner

Holding and Visceral Attention: Bodily Concentration of an Analyst under COVID-19 Lockdown.

This essay emerged from my clinical experience of working psychoanalytically by remote means due to the pandemic of COVID‐19. During analytic listening, in the absence of bodily togetherness and in the presence of heightened anxiety about survival, I turned my attention inwardly towards the interior of my own body and made a spontaneous gesture of doodling. These two moves, mental and bodily, both unintentional and unconventional to my analytic training, restored my psychic aliveness and facilitated the process of analytic holding. I will reflect on this particular experience using Milner's concepts: framed gap and the analyst's concentration of the body, which I further conceptualize as ‘visceral attention’. I consider it as a corporal counterpart of ‘free‐floating attention’. It is my contention that the concept of visceral attention has a wider implication for analytic technique in the ordinary psychoanalytic setting when uncertainty prevails in psychoanalytic treatment and with patients whose predicament is marked by body–mind split. The essay explores an analogy between visceral attention and doodling to hold the analytic process at a non‐verbal level. The blank paper and blank inside of the body stand for the ‘framed gap’, the negative space for a new symbol to emerge.

Neural underpinnings of co-speech gesture perception in schizophrenia: A review

Impaired communication is one of the key features of schizophrenia. Therefore, an investigation of the disease’s nature calls for a better understanding of the neural underpinnings of not only verbal communication but also the lesser-studied non-verbal communication. Spontaneous gestures accompanying oral speech are one of the most important channels for the transmission of non-verbal information. Poor gesture performance in schizophrenia is well documented, but data on the relevant neurophysiological and neuroanatomical aberrations have been obtained only recently. Compared to gesture performance, the perception of gestures provides more opportunities for neurophysiological study, as it does not require a participant’s active movement during measurements or the development of time-consuming expert annotations for each participant’s gestures. At the same time, the brain mechanisms of gesture perception in schizophrenia are understudied. In this review, the existing evidence is analyzed, and future perspectives for studying the brain correlates of spontaneous gesture perception in schizophrenia are discussed. To clarify the context of such studies, we briefly describe data on the brain organization of co-speech gestures, the perception of such gestures in healthy individuals, and the cognitive and social neuroscience methods through which such data may be obtained.

Give yourself a hand: The role of gesture and working memory in preschoolers’ numerical knowledge

Hand gestures can be beneficial in math contexts to reduce the user’s cognitive load by supporting domain-general abilities such as working memory. Although prior work has shown a strong relation between young children’s early math performance and their general cognitive abilities, it is important to consider how children’s working memory ability may relate to their use of spontaneous gesture as well as their math-specific abilities. The current study examined how preschool-aged children’s gesture use and working memory relate to their performance on an age-appropriate math task. Head Start preschoolers (N = 81) were videotaped while completing a modified version of the Give-N task to measure their cardinality understanding. Children also completed a forward word span task and a computerized Corsi Block task to assess their working memory. The results showed that children’s spontaneous gesture use and working memory were related to their performance on the cardinality task. However, children’s gestures were not significantly related to working memory after controlling for age. Findings suggest that young children from low-income backgrounds use gestures during math contexts in similar ways to preschoolers from higher-income backgrounds.