However, one serendipitous observation lends weight to the possibility that gestures helped people reason in our studies: a handful of participants produced gestures while reading the lesson to themselves, and these gestures often formed extended sequences like those produced during the explanations.
Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency all have missions to Mars planned in the next five years - so further analysis during these rounds of explanation could settle the matter for good.
Kimmel, for one, couldn't keep a straight face during the explanation, prompting Paltrow to joke, "I don't know what the f**k we talk about!" .
However, the sociocultural and religious beliefs, and security concerns of the study participants may be additional limitations of the study, despite all our assurances of confidentiality during the explanation of the purpose of the study.
Participants gestured during both explanations.
Despite this change and mirroring the primary findings of Study 1 participants showed strong evidence of drawing on spatial analogy during their explanations.
Though the lesson was highly abstract and people were not instructed to gesture, people produced spatial gestures in abundance during their explanations.
Cooperrider, Gentner, and Goldin-Meadow (2016 7 studied spontaneous student gestures during explanations of abstract concepts.
Fig. 4 Examples of gestures that are model-integrated (sequence 1) and gestures that are not model-integrated (sequence 2) produced during explanations of negative feedback.
In a similar vein, gestures during explanations of math problems also help learners to track their thinking and reduce working memory usage so that they can allocate more cognitive effort to problem solving (Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner, 2001).
