Newsletter – 30 July 2021

Continuing with my series on recent findings in cognitive neuroscience, this week I will explain how gesturing supports our thinking and learning. 

Research has found gesturing has a cognitive and communication function beyond what language alone can offer. Linguists believe gesturing was our species earliest form of language. We can still see evidence of this in babies whose first means of communication is to use gesturing, such as waving their arms to signal ‘pick me up’.

So why are gestures so important? Well, firstly gestures convey a sense of how things look and feel. They have also been shown to enhance our memory by reinforcing spoken words with visual and movement cues which offloads some of the mental load onto our hands. Gesture has been found to be particularly helpful in helping us to understand and express abstract concepts, especially visual ones. When we can’t quite find words for a concept we are struggling with, we move our hands to capture some part of our emerging understanding. This experience of making and seeing our hand gestures then helps us to find the language we are searching for. Studies show that we actually gesture more when we are trying to understand or make sense of something new. As our understanding deepens, our language becomes more precise and our reliance on gesturing becomes less frequent and more defined as our hand movements and spoken language become coordinated. Further studies indicate our ability to talk fluently is impaired when we cannot gesture. A lack of gesturing has also been shown to limit our ability to solve problems and explain our thinking. The reason for this is because our hands often process information before our brains can catch up. Most interestingly for the RGLPS community, people who are fluent in sign language have been shown to have enhanced ability to process visual and spatial information. Finally, hand gestures appear to alert the auditory cortex in our brain that meaningful communication is taking place and to pay more attention. The gestures give our brain a type of mental marker or hook, which enables that material to be more easily recalled later.

So how can parents use gesturing to support their child’s learning?

Encourage your child to move their hands when they explain things. This will help them find words and make sense of new concepts.

As parents, use gesturing when you talk to your child – it has been shown parents who gesture more frequently expand their child’s vocabularies. Less exposure to gesturing leads to smaller vocabularies.

Encourage children to have something to gesture AT eg. charts, maps, photos, models. These artifacts act as a kind of scaffold as we process and explain new information.

Use deliberate ‘beat’ gestures to highlight a main point or key piece of information when trying to remember or share information with others. This coordination of words and gestures emphasises information, which helps it be retained in the memory.

I hope this information has been both practical and insightful. Next week, I will summarise how natural spaces can help our learning.

Reference: ‘The Extended Mind : The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain’ – Annie Murphy Paul (Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).