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Put your hands up! Gesturing improves preschoolers' executive function.

Candace L Rhoads1, Patricia H Miller1, Gina O Jaeger2

  • 1Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, United States.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|April 21, 2018
PubMed
Summary
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Preschoolers who gestured while sorting showed improved executive functioning on a card sorting task. This suggests that encouraging children's gesturing may support the development of cognitive skills like task switching.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Psychology

Background:

  • Previous research indicates a correlation between preschoolers' gesturing and executive functioning.
  • The causal direction of this relationship remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the causal role of gesturing in preschoolers' executive functioning.
  • To examine how induced gesturing affects performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task.

Main Methods:

  • Fifty preschoolers were divided into a Gesture group (induced gesturing) and a Control group ("think hard").
  • Participants completed two DCCS tasks involving sorting by different dimensions.
  • Performance was analyzed over trials to observe patterns in both groups.
Keywords:
DCCSDevelopmentExecutive functionGesturePreschoolersTraining

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • The Gesture group exhibited more accurate sorting than the Control group after a dimension switch, especially younger children on the second task.
  • The frequency of gesturing positively predicted sorting accuracy in younger children on the second task.
  • A delayed benefit of gesturing was observed in younger children, suggesting a potential utilization deficiency.

Conclusions:

  • Induced gesturing causally enhances executive functioning in preschoolers' sorting tasks.
  • Gesturing may play a crucial role in the development of executive functions, including task switching.
  • Findings suggest future research into the interplay between gesture, thought, and executive function development.