{"pk":25632,"title":"The mental number-line spreads by gestural contagion","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Mathematical expertise builds on a foundation of space,\nespecially the ability to map exact numbers to linear space.\nThis “mental number-line” is known to vary cross-culturally,\nbut there is debate about the mechanisms responsible for its\ncultural elaboration. We investigated the role of co-speech\ngesture, a ubiquitous cultural activity, in stabilizing and\nentrenching the mental number-line within a community.\nImitating culture-specific gestures systematically shaped\ngesturers’ mental number-line. Moreover, gestures were used\nspontaneously to infer speakers’ spatial understanding of\nnumber, and merely observing these gestures was sufficient to\nshape the observer’s own mental number-line. These findings\nestablish co-speech gesture as one mechanism for propagating\nand perpetuating the number-line","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"numerical cognition; SNARC; mental numberline;\ngestural contagion; gesture"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75q3g0s4","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Tyler","middle_name":"","last_name":"Marghetis","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Luke","middle_name":"C","last_name":"Eberle","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Benjamin","middle_name":"K","last_name":"Bergen","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25632/galley/15256/download/"}]}