Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sensitivity to the causal structure underlying phenomena iscritical to expert understanding. Fostering such understandingin learners is therefore a key goal in education. Wehypothesized that observing analogical gestures—whichrepresent relational information in visuospatial format—would lead learners to notice and reason about underlyingcausal patterns, such as positive and negative feedback.Participants watched brief video lectures about the humanbody and the plant kingdom, which were delivered along withgestures representing either: 1) visuospatial details (iconicgesture condition); or 2) relational structure (analogicalgesture condition). In a subsequent classification task, relativeto participants who saw iconic gestures, participants who sawanalogical gestures were more likely to sort the phenomenadescribed in the videos—as well as novel phenomena—bytheir causal structure (e.g., positive feedback). The resultssuggest that analogical gestures can be harnessed to fostercausal understanding.