TY - GEN
T1 - Analogical gestures foster understanding of causal systems
AU - Cooperrider, Kensy
AU - Gentner, Dedre
AU - Goldin-Meadow, Susan
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding for this study was provided by the NSF Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SBE 0541957, Gentner and Goldin-Meadow are co-PIs), the Office of Naval Research (ONR (N00014-16-1-2613 to Gentner), and NICHD (R01-HD47450 to Goldin-Meadow).
Publisher Copyright:
© CogSci 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - analogy
KW - complex systems
KW - gesture
KW - learning
KW - relational reasoning
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85056866777
T3 - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition
SP - 240
EP - 245
BT - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017
Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 29 July 2017
ER -