Does Gesture Lighten the Load? The Case of Verbal Analogies.

ABSTRACT: 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 second

SUBMITTER: Overoye AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7528622 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature