Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Teaching a new concept with gestures – hand movements thataccompany speech – facilitates learning above-and-beyondinstruction through speech alone (e.g., Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). However, the mechanisms underlying thisphenomenon are still being explored. Here, we use eyetracking to explore one mechanism – gesture’s ability todirect visual attention. We examine how children allocatetheir visual attention during a mathematical equivalencelesson that either contains gesture or does not. We show thatgesture instruction improves posttest performance, andadditionally that gesture does change how children visuallyattend to instruction: children look more to the problem beingexplained, and less to the instructor. However lookingpatterns alone cannot explain gesture’s effect, as posttestperformance is not predicted by any of our looking-timemeasures. These findings suggest that gesture does guidevisual attention, but that attention alone cannot account for itsfacilitative learning effects.