Does Gesture Lighten the Load? The Case of Verbal Analogies

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Acacia L. Overoye¹  Margaret Wilson² 

[1] Behavioral Science Department, Utah Valley University, United States;Psychology Department, University of California Santa Cruz, United States

关键词: gesture;    working memory;    cognitive load;    offloading;    problem solving;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571109

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY