Journal article
Kensy Cooperrider, D. Gentner, S. Goldin‐Meadow
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2017
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2017
Semantic Scholar
DBLP
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APA
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Cooperrider, K., Gentner, D., & Goldin‐Meadow, S. (2017). Analogical gestures foster understanding of causal systems. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Chicago/Turabian
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Cooperrider, Kensy, D. Gentner, and S. Goldin‐Meadow. “Analogical Gestures Foster Understanding of Causal Systems.” Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2017).
MLA
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Cooperrider, Kensy, et al. “Analogical Gestures Foster Understanding of Causal Systems.” Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2017.
BibTeX Click to copy
@article{kensy2017a,
title = {Analogical gestures foster understanding of causal systems},
year = {2017},
journal = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
author = {Cooperrider, Kensy and Gentner, D. and Goldin‐Meadow, S.}
}
Abstract
Sensitivity to the causal structure underlying phenomena is critical to expert understanding. Fostering such understanding in learners is therefore a key goal in education. We hypothesized that observing analogical gestures—which represent relational information in visuospatial format— would lead learners to notice and reason about underlying causal patterns, such as positive and negative feedback. Participants watched brief video lectures about the human body and the plant kingdom, which were delivered along with gestures representing either: 1) visuospatial details (iconic gesture condition); or 2) relational structure (analogical gesture condition). In a subsequent classification task, relative to participants who saw iconic gestures, participants who saw analogical gestures were more likely to sort the phenomena described in the videos—as well as novel phenomena—by their causal structure (e.g., positive feedback). The results suggest that analogical gestures can be harnessed to foster causal understanding.
