{"pk":26423,"title":"There is more to gesture than meets the eye: Visual attention to gesture’s referents cannot account for itsfacilitative effects during math instruction","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Teaching a new concept with gestures – hand movements thataccompany speech – facilitates learning above-and-beyondinstruction through speech alone (e.g., Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). However, the mechanisms underlying thisphenomenon are still being explored. Here, we use eyetracking to explore one mechanism – gesture’s ability todirect visual attention. We examine how children allocatetheir visual attention during a mathematical equivalencelesson that either contains gesture or does not. We show thatgesture instruction improves posttest performance, andadditionally that gesture does change how children visuallyattend to instruction: children look more to the problem beingexplained, and less to the instructor. However lookingpatterns alone cannot explain gesture’s effect, as posttestperformance is not predicted by any of our looking-timemeasures. These findings suggest that gesture does guidevisual attention, but that attention alone cannot account for itsfacilitative learning effects.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Gesture; eye tracking; learning; visual attention"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xf396s5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Miriam","middle_name":"","last_name":"Novack","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wakefield","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Eliza","middle_name":"","last_name":"Congdon","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Steven","middle_name":"","last_name":"Franconeri","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""},{"first_name":"Susan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Goldin-Meadow","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26423/galley/16059/download/"}]}