Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined the effect of instructor gesture and distractorpresence on students’ encoding of slope and intercept ingraphs of linear functions. In Experiment 1, participantswatched an instructor avatar introduce a linear graph whileeither pointing to the intercept, tracing the over-and-upincrease for slope, or not gesturing (i.e., gaze only). They thenreconstructed the graph on paper. Participants weresignificantly more successful at encoding slope after watchingthe slope gesture than after watching no gesture. InExperiment 2, participants watched the avatar either point tothe intercept or trace the slope, each either in the presence orabsence of a visual distractor. Participants were significantlymore successful at encoding slope after watching the tracinggesture than after watching the pointing gesture. Distractorpresence did not affect performance. Taken together, theseresults suggest that teachers’ gestures promote students’encoding of relevant information and could help explain whyteachers’ gestures often benefit students’ learning.