Using Gestures and Body Movements for Thinking and Learning

Jing Zhao

Gestures have been found to be helpful to people in many cognitive and daily activities, such as speaking, counting, learning, and problem solving. However, different gestures benefit people to different degrees, and people use gestures in different ways to assist thinking and learning. From an embodied cognition perspective, gesture is seen as a simulated action. Therefore, to further understand the mechanisms of gesture’s effects on thinking will directly help us harness embodied cognition theories to guide teaching and learning. In the literature, it is widely known that gesture not only reflects thinking, but also actively promotes thinking and learning. However, the mechanisms that account for gesture’s effects on cognition remained obscure to us. To better understand how different types of gestures benefit thinking and learning, Study 1 was conducted with 31 participants to...