When gestures show us the way: Co-thought gestures selectively facilitate navigation and spatial memory

ABSTRACT

How does gesturing during route learning relate to subsequent spatial performance? We examined the relationship between gestures produced spontaneously while studying route directions and spatial representations of the navigated environment. Participants studied route directions, then navigated those routes from memory in a virtual environment, and finally had their memory of the environment assessed. We found that, for navigators with low spatial perspective-taking performance on the Spatial Orientation Test, more gesturing from a survey perspective predicted more accurate memory following navigation. Thus, co-thought gestures accompanying route learning relate to performance selectively, depending on the gesturers’ spatial ability and the perspective of their gestures. Survey gestures may help some individuals visualize an overall route that they can retain in memory.

KEYWORDS:

• gestures
• navigation
• spatial memory
• route learning
• individual differences

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Victor Schinazi for designing the virtual environment used in the studies, to Michalis Michaelides for useful discussions on the data analysis, to Philippos Panagiotou for assistance with data collection, and to Georgia Leonidou, Elena Stylianopoulou and Artemis Stefani for assistance with coding. We also thank Dan Montello and three anonymous reviewers for suggestions that significantly improved this article.

Funding

This material was supported by a SAVI grant from NSF to A.G., through the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) SBE 1041707, and by ERC-2007-StG 206912-OSSMA from the European Research Council to M.A.

Notes

¹ Felicitous deviations from the route (e.g., going up to the entrance of Tobler Museum to read its sign) were identified on the basis of the Experimenter’s notes and audio recordings of the navigation phase, and were not counted as navigation errors. Backtracking to an earlier location on the path to recover from an error, whether prompted by the experimenter or self-initiated, was also not considered an erroneous deviation.

² In models with the frequency or duration of representational gestures (combining the categories of route, survey, location, and ambiguous: route vs. survey gestures), there was no evidence of moderated mediation, whether in terms of the index of moderated mediation or in terms of the conditional indirect effect of gesturing.

³ Note that using standardized variables (namely, ZSOT) complicates the interpretation of the value of regression coefficients, because standardization results in estimates of the variable’s effect that have to be interpreted in terms of differences between cases that differ by one standard deviation (vs. one unit in the original metric of measurement). These regression coefficients should be interpreted only in terms of their sign (Hayes, 2013).

⁴ A nonsignificant interaction (i.e., a confidence interval for the regression of the interaction term of the moderation that includes zero) does not imply that the indirect effect is not moderated by individual ability, because that interaction does not quantify the relationship between the moderator and the indirect effect. A bootstrap confidence interval for the index of moderated mediation that does not include zero provides more direct and definitive evidence of moderation of the indirect effect of the predictor on the outcome than a test of moderation of one of its paths (Hayes, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This material was supported by a SAVI grant from NSF to A.G., through the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) SBE 1041707, and by ERC-2007-StG 206912-OSSMA from the European Research Council to M.A.