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Gesture Facilitates Children's Creative Thinking.

Elizabeth Kirk1, Carine Lewis2

  • 11 Department of Psychology, University of York.

Psychological Science
|February 10, 2017
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Gestures aid creative thinking by helping problem solvers generate novel ideas. Encouraging children to gesture significantly boosted their creative output, highlighting the self-oriented function of gestures.

Keywords:
cognitive processescreativitygesturesproblem solving

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Human Behavior

Background:

  • Gestures are known to aid cognitive processes and problem-solving.
  • The self-oriented function of gestures, particularly in creative thinking, remains less explored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of spontaneous and encouraged gestures in children's creative thinking.
  • To explore the self-oriented function of gestures in the domain of idea generation.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: Correlated children's spontaneous gesture production with performance on an alternative-uses task.
  • Experiment 1: Assessed the impact of restricting gestures on creative fluency.
  • Experiment 2: Examined the effect of encouraging gestures on creative idea generation.

Main Results:

  • A significant correlation was found between children's creative fluency and their gesture production.
  • Restricting gestures did not significantly impair creative fluency in Experiment 1.
  • Encouraging gestures significantly enhanced creative idea generation in Experiment 2.

Conclusions:

  • Gestures play a significant self-oriented role in assisting creative thinking.
  • Facilitating gesture production can be a strategy to boost idea generation and creativity in children.