Journal article
Gesturing during mental problem solving reduces eye movements, especially for individuals with lower visual working memory capacity
Cognitive processing, Vol.17(3), pp.269-277
31/07/2016
PMID: 26993293
Metrics
1 Record Views
Abstract
Non-communicative hand gestures have been found to benefit problem-solving performance. These gestures seem to compensate for limited internal cognitive capacities, such as visual working memory capacity. Yet, it is not clear how gestures might perform this cognitive function. One hypothesis is that gesturing is a means to spatially index mental simulations, thereby reducing the need for visually projecting the mental simulation onto the visual presentation of the task. If that hypothesis is correct, less eye movements should be made when participants gesture during problem solving than when they do not gesture. We therefore used mobile eye tracking to investigate the effect of co-thought gesturing and visual working memory capacity on eye movements during mental solving of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Results revealed that gesturing indeed reduced the number of eye movements (lower saccade counts), especially for participants with a relatively lower visual working memory capacity. Subsequent problem-solving performance was not affected by having (not) gestured during the mental solving phase. The current findings suggest that our understanding of gestures in problem solving could be improved by taking into account eye movements during gesturing.
Details
- Title
- Gesturing during mental problem solving reduces eye movements, especially for individuals with lower visual working memory capacity
- Creators
- Myrto-Foteini Mavilidi - University of WollongongWim T J L Pouw - University of WollongongTamara van Gog - Erasmus University RotterdamFred Paas - Erasmus University Rotterdam
- Publication Details
- Cognitive processing, Vol.17(3), pp.269-277
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Grant note
- This research was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO-PROO, project number: 411-10-908) and supported by Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (97010.11/14.0798)
- Identifiers
- 991013335328402368
- Copyright
- © Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016.
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article