The Facilitation Of Observeing Gestures And Actions On Mental Rotation Learning

Embodied cognition theory suggests that people’s bodies and their interactions with the world influence cognitive processes.Gestures and actions are two common body movements that have been found to influence learning and thinking.Although both gestures and actions are bodily movements,gestures are different from actions.Researchers comparing the beneficial effects of gesturing and acting on learning found that gestures were more effective than actions in areas such as verb learning,chemical molecule learning,and path memory.However,previous studies comparing gestures and actions have been of learners generating their own gestures or actions,and other studies have found that observing gestures and observing actions can also have a beneficial effect on learning.Mental rotation is most commonly used to measure spatial visualization ability,which has an important role in everyday life as well as in the creation of innovations in mathematical and sciences.Therefore,the present study examined the beneficial effects of gestures and actions on mental rotation learning in a observing-only context.Specifically,the study uses a three-dimensional mental rotation task to examine whether observing gestures facilitates learning more than observing actions,and whether the dominant effect of observing gestures depends on a strong link between gestures and speech.The examination of these questions will provide new evidence for the effects of gesture and action in learning in the spatial task of mental rotation and help to reveal the important role of the close connection between gesture and speech in gesture facilitation of spatial learning.This study consisted of three experiments.Experiment 1 examined whether observing gestures facilitated mental rotation learning more than observing movements.The experiment used a one-way between-subjects design,with the independent variable being the learning condition(observing gestures\observing actiono training)and the dependent variables being the improvement in correctness on the pre-and post-mental rotation test(correctness on the post-test minus correctness on the pre-test)and the change in solution time(solution time on the post-test minus solution time on the pre-test).Experiment 2 built on Experiment 1 to examine whether observing gestures contributed more to mental rotation learning than observing actions that depended on verbal accompaniment.Experiment 2 used a 2(learning condition: observing gestures\observing actions)× 2(speech concomitant condition: concomitant speechon-concomitant speech)between-subjects design with the same dependent variable as in Experiment 1.In addition,a strong temporal synchronization between gesture and speech was found,and if the dominance effect of observing gestures depends on the close link between gesture and speech,then the dominant effect of observing gestures should also be influenced by the order of gesture and speech presentation.Experiment 3 used a 2(learning condition: observing gesture\observing action)× 2(order of presentation: simultaneous presentation\sequential presentation)between-subjects design to further examine whether the dominant effect of observing gestures was affected by the order of gesture and speech presentation.The following main results were obtained in this study.(1)The results of Experiment 1 found that both the observing gesture and observing action groups were higher than the no-training group in terms of improvement in the correctness of the mental rotation test,and the improvement in the correctness of the subjects in the observing gesture group was again significantly higher than that in the observing action group.This indicates that observing gestures is more effective than observing actions in 3D mental rotation learning.(2)The results of Experiment 2 revealed that there was a significant interaction between the learning condition and the verbal concomitant condition: in the concomitant verbal condition,the learning effect(i.e.,correctness improvement)was significantly better in the observing gesture group than in the observing action group,while in the non-concomitant verbal condition,there was no significant difference in the learning effect between the observing gesture and observing action groups.This result suggests that the advantageous effect of observing gestures to facilitate mental rotation learning compared to observing actions depends on the accompanying speech,indicating a strong link between gestures and speech.(3)The results of Experiment 3 revealed that the interaction between learning condition and presentation order was significant,with the gesture-observing group having a significantly higher correctness than the action-observing group when speech and gesture or action were presented simultaneously,while there was no significant difference between the gesture-observing and action-observing groups when speech and gesture or action were presented sequentially.This result suggests that the relative effects of observing gestures and observing actions to facilitate mental rotation learning are affected by the order of presentation of gestures or actions and speech,and that the dominant effect of observing gestures disappears and becomes indistinguishable from observing actions when presented sequentially,further supporting the strong link between gestures and speech.The following main conclusions were obtained from this study.(1)Observing gestures contributed more to learning mental rotation than observing actions.(2)The dominant effect of observing gestures in mental rotation learning was influenced by verbal accompaniment,and observing gestures was superior to observing actions only in the presence of verbal accompaniment.(3)The dominance effect of observing gestures over observing actions is affected by the order of presentation of gestures and speech,and observing gestures is superior to observing actions only when gestures and speech are presented simultaneously.