Spontaneous Gesture Production Promotes Analogical Transfer in Preschoolers

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

We examine whether producing spontaneous gestures during narrative retelling improves children’s analogical transfer. Spontaneous gestures are thought to signal a transitional state of mind, reflecting early representations of concepts that are not yet revealed in children’s speech (e.g. Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Garber & Goldin-Meadow, 2002). In fact, several recent proposals suggest that gestures may facilitate generalization of knowledge by selectively schematizing some features over others (e.g. Kita et al., 2017), and adults’ spontaneous gestures tend to capture more abstract relations, as observed in explanation tasks (e.g. Cooperrider et al., 2016).
Here we explore the role of spontaneous gestures in supporting children’s analogical reasoning, which depends on their ability to recognize the shared structure across contexts (e.g. Brown et al., 1986). We hypothesize that children who spontaneously produce gestures during learning will perform better in analogical transfer tasks, compared to children who did not use gestures during the retelling task. We also examine whether producing gestures that are relevant to the goal structure of the task (vs. gestures that emphasize superficial details) may be particularly important for children’s success. To test this, we used three superficially distinct stories in which the protagonists each shared a common goal (i.e., moving items across a barrier) and discovered a common solution (i.e., rolling a flat material into a tube to pass the items through to the other side; from Brown et al.,1986).
Five to seven year old children (n = 43) were presented with stories on a laptop screen. After listening to each of the first two stories, participants were asked to retell what happened in the story, and to describe how the protagonist solved the problem. Although children were not instructed to gesture during retelling, we coded children’s spontaneous gestures. Then, in an analogical transfer task, participants listened to a third story, in which the protagonist was confronted with the same goal, and children were asked to generate the solution themselves.
Findings indicate that children’s spontaneous gesture production was significantly correlated with their ability to engage in analogical transfer, t(41) = 2.35, p < 0.03, r = 0.34. Although we found no relationship between the type of gesture produced to children’s success on the analogical transfer task, t(22) = 1.77, p = 0.09, r = 0.35, this lack of significant effect may be due to the small sample size. This initial study is the first to link the developmental literature on gesture production and analogical transfer. We suggest that children’s spontaneous gestures during story retelling may provide a window into their analogical processing, which may be indicative of later performance on analogical transfer. In ongoing work, we further explore this relationship by examining the underlying mechanism. Specifically, we consider whether spontaneous gestures selectively promote attention toward abstract (goal structure) information over superficial features.

Authors

• Minju Kim, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Caren M. Walker, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author