Our body language can reveal more about what we know than our verbal language
Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “We change our minds by moving our hands,” writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work published in the current issue of the journalCognitiveScience. Particularly significant are what she calls “mismatches” between verbal expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which is correct. Such discrepancies indicate that we’re in a transitional state, moving from one level ofunderstandingto another. The thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem we’re working on; we can’t yet assimilate these notions into language, but we can capture them in movement. When a child employs gesture, Goldin-Meadow notes, “the information about the child’s cognitive state is conveyed sub rosa — below the surface of ordinary conversation.” Such gesture-speech mismatches have been found in toddlers going through a vocabulary spurt, in elementary-school children describing why the seasons change, and in adults attempting to explain how a machine works.
Goldin-Meadow’s more recent work shows not only that gesture is an index to our readiness to learn, but that it actually helps to bring learning about. It does so in two ways. First, it elicits helpful behavior from others around us. Goldin-Meadow has found that adults spontaneously respond to children’s speech-gesture mismatches by adjusting their mode of instruction.Parentsand teachers apparently receive the signal that children are ready to learn, and they act on it by offering a greater variety of problem-solving strategies.
The act of gesturing itself also seems to accelerate learning, bringing nascent knowledge into consciousness and aiding the understanding of new concepts. A 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, reported that third-graders who were asked to gesture while learning algebra were nearly three times more likely to remember what they’d learned than classmates who did not gesture. Another experiment conducted by Cook determined that college students who gestured as they retold short stories they’d seen recalled the details of the stories better, suggesting that gesturing as we’re remembering helps retrieve the information from memory.
Published on June 11, 2012 by Annie Murphy Paul in How To Be Brilliant
