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How Gestures Help us Think

December 1, 2008

When we try to communicate something complicated, we often gesture. Gesturing seems to help us think things through. When we gesture, we activate mental images and maintain them in working memory. Now research is showing exactly what happens in the brain when students and teachers gesture in the classroom. This has important implications for learning in mathematics and other subjects, says UW-Madison psychology professor Martha Alibali. Recent research by Alibali and colleagues has found that gestures accompanying speech are involved with more than general memory demands: They are specifically associated with the cognitive demands involved in speaking about spatial information. More information about Alibali's work is available here.