Action's Influence on Thought: The Case of Gesture

Abstract

Recent research has shown that people's actions can influence how they think. A separate body of research has shown that the gestures people produce when they speak can also influence how they think. In this article, we bring these two literatures together to explore whether gesture has an effect on thinking by virtue of its ability to reflect real-world actions. We first argue that gestures contain detailed perceptual-motor information about the actions they represent, information often not found in the speech that accompanies the gestures. We then show that the action features in gesture do not just reflect the gesturer's thinking--they can feed back and alter that thinking. Gesture actively brings action into a speaker's mental representations, and those mental representations then affect behavior--at times more powerfully than do the actions on which the gestures are based. Gesture thus has the potential to serve as a unique bridge between action and abstract thought.

Keywords: action; embodied cognition; gesture; problem solving.

Figure 1

Difference in time (top graph) and moves (bottom graph) taken to solve the TOH problem (TOH2 – TOH1) for adults who, after completing TOH1, explained how they solved the task and gestured about moving the disks (Gesture group, left bars); and adults who solved the task rather than explain it and thus actually moved the disks (Action group, right bars). In the Gesture group, adults in the Switch condition showed less improvement (i.e., a more positive change score) from TOH1 to TOH2 than adults in the No-Switch condition. In contrast, in the Action group, adults showed no difference between conditions.