Theories of how adults interpret the actions of others have focused on the goals and intentions of actors engaged in object-directed actions. Recent research has challenged this assumption, and shown that movements are often interpreted as being for their own sake (Schachner & Carey, 2013). Here we postulate a third interpretation of movement—movement that represents action, but does not literally act on objects in the world. These movements are gestures. In this paper, we describe a framework for predicting when movements are likely to be seen as representations. In Study 1, adults described one of three scenes: (1) an actor moving objects, (2) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them) or (3) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants systematically described the movements as depicting an object-directed action when the actor moved objects, and favored describing the movements as depicting movement for its own sake when the actor produced the same movements in the absence of objects. However, participants favored describing the movements as representations when the actor produced the movements near, but not on, the objects. Study 2 explored two additional features—the form of an actor’s hands and the presence of speech-like sounds—to test the effect of context on observers’ classification of movement as representational. When movements are seen as representations, they have the power to influence communication, learning, and cognition in ways that movement for its own sake does not. By incorporating representational gesture into our framework for movement analysis, we take an important step towards developing a more cohesive understanding of action-interpretation.

Teaching a new concept through gestures-hand movements that accompany speech-facilitates learning above-and-beyond instruction through speech alone (e.g., Singer & Goldin-Meadow, ). However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still under investigation. Here, we use eye tracking to explore one often proposed mechanism-gesture's ability to direct visual attention. Behaviorally, we replicate previous findings: Children perform significantly better on a posttest after learning through Speech+Gesture instruction than through Speech Alone instruction. Using eye tracking measures, we show that children who watch a math lesson with gesture do allocate their visual attention differently from children who watch a math lesson without gesture-they look more to the problem being explained, less to the instructor, and are more likely to synchronize their visual attention with information presented in the instructor's speech (i.e., follow along with speech) than children who watch the no-gesture lesson. The striking finding is that, even though these looking patterns positively predict learning outcomes, the patterns do not mediate the effects of training condition (Speech Alone vs. Speech+Gesture) on posttest success. We find instead a complex relation between gesture and visual attention in which gesture moderates the impact of visual looking patterns on learning-following along with speech predicts learning for children in the Speech+Gesture condition, but not for children in the Speech Alone condition. Gesture's beneficial effects on learning thus come not merely from its ability to guide visual attention, but also from its ability to synchronize with speech and affect what learners glean from that speech.

Verb learning is difficult for children (Gentner, ), partially because children have a bias to associate a novel verb not only with the action it represents, but also with the object on which it is learned (Kersten & Smith, ). Here we investigate how well 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 48) generalize novel verbs for actions on objects after doing or seeing the action (e.g., twisting a knob on an object) or after doing or seeing a gesture for the action (e.g., twisting in the air near an object). We find not only that children generalize more effectively through gesture experience, but also that this ability to generalize persists after a 24-hour delay.

Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience-physically rotating objects-or gesture experience-showing how objects could rotate (e.g.,

Previous studies have shown that pairing a film excerpt with different musical soundtracks can change the audience’s interpretation of the scene. This study examined the effects of mixing the same piece of music at different levels of loudness in a film soundtrack to suggest diegeticmusic (“source music,” presented as if arising from within the fictional world of the film characters) or to suggest nondiegetic music (a “dramatic score” accompanying the scene but not originating from within the fictional world). Adjusting the level of loudness significantly altered viewers’ perceptions of many elements that are fundamental to the storyline, including inferences about the relationship, intentions, and emotions of the film characters, their romantic interest toward each other, and the overall perceived tension of the scene. Surprisingly, varying the loudness (and resulting timbre) of the same piece of music produced greater differences in viewers’ interpretations of the film scene and characters than switching to a different music track. This finding is of theoretical and practical interest as changes in loudness and timbre are among the primary post-production modifications sound editors make to differentiate “source music” from “dramatic score” in motion pictures, and the effects on viewers have rarely been empirically investigated.

Fifty participants who had never learned how to read music completed a questionnaire about their interpretations of standard western musical notation. Some common assumptions were that a note must consist of a circle plus a line, symbols with unfilled spaces denote silence, the value of notes and rests increases with the size and number of features of a symbol, pitch is denoted by both note-head and stem, and tempo is determined by horizontal spacing. These assumptions are not consistent with the conventions of standard musical notation, thus the findings of the study suggest that many fundamental aspects of notation are not intuitive to beginners. Implications of the findings are discussed with respect to music pedagogy.

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Asking children to gesture while being taught a concept facilitates their learning. Here, we investigated whether children benefitted equally from producing gestures that reflected speech (speech-gesture matches) versus gestures that complemented speech (speech-gesture mismatches), when learning the concept of palindromes. As in previous studies, we compared the utility of each gesture strategy to a speech alone strategy. Because our task was heavily based on language ability, we also considered children's phonological competency as a predictor of success at posttest. Across conditions, children who had low phonological competence were equally likely to perform well at posttest. However, gesture use was predictive of learning for children with high phonological competence: Those who produced either gesture strategy during training were more likely to learn than children who used a speech alone strategy. These results suggest that educators should be encouraged to use either speech-gesture match or mismatch strategies to aid learners, but that gesture may be especially beneficial to children who possess basic skills related to the new concept, in this case, phonological competency. Results also suggest that there are differences between the cognitive effects of naturally produced speech-gesture matches and mismatches, and those that are scripted and taught to children.