The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the within domain analyses, all of the measures formed single factors at each age, suggesting consistent, unitary structures across this age range. Yet, as in previous work, the 2 domains were highly correlated, both in terms of overall composite score and pairwise comparisons of individual tasks. When both spatial and mathematics scores were submitted to the same factor analysis, the 2 domain specific factors again emerged, but there also were significant cross-domain factor loadings that varied with age. Multivariate regressions replicated the factor analysis and further revealed that mental rotation was the best predictor of mathematical performance in kindergarten, and visual-spatial working memory was the best predictor of mathematical performance in sixth grade. The mathematical tasks that predicted the most variance in spatial skill were place value (K, 3rd, 6th), word problems (3rd, 6th), calculation (K), fraction concepts (3rd), and algebra (6th). Thus, although spatial skill and mathematics each have strong internal structures, they also share significant overlap, and have particularly strong cross-domain relations for certain tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record

In numerous experimental contexts, gesturing has been shown to lighten a speaker’s cognitive load. However, in all of these experimental paradigms, the gestures have been directed to items in the ‘here-and-now’. This study attempts to generalize gesture’s ability to lighten cognitive load. We demonstrate here that gesturing continues to confer cognitive benefits when speakers talk about objects that are not present, and therefore cannot be directly indexed by gesture. These findings suggest that gesturing confers its benefits by more than simply tying abstract speech to the objects directly visible in the environment. Moreover, we show that the cognitive benefit conferred by gesturing is greater when novice learners produce gestures that add to the information expressed in speech than when they produce gestures that convey the same information as speech, suggesting that it is gesture’s meaningfulness that gives it the ability to affect working memory load.

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this hypothesis. Here we investigate the possibility that gesture helps children learn even when it is not produced in relation to an object but is instead produced "in the air." We gave children instruction in Piagetian conservation problems with or without gesture and with or without concrete objects. We found that children given instruction with speech and gesture learned more about conservation than children given instruction with speech alone, whether or not objects were present during instruction. Moreover, children who received instruction in speech and gesture were more likely to give explanations for how they solved the problems that they were not taught during the experiment; this advantage was found only when objects were absent during instruction. Gesture in instruction can thus help learners learn even when those gestures do not direct attention to visible objects, suggesting that gesture can do more for learners than simply ground arbitrary, symbolic language in the physical, observable world.

People often make judgments about the valence, pleasantness, or likeability of objects and other stimuli they encounter. These judgments can occur even before a stimulus is processed for meaning (Zajonc, 1980). But, what drives people's judgments of how much they like an object or how pleasant they deem it to be? Preferences for one object over another have been shown to be based on perceptual features such as symmetry, high figure-ground contrast, object size, and typicality. Moreover, previous experience interacting with an object can increase the perceptual ease or fluency of processing it, which in turn increases positive affect towards the item in question (for a review, see Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004).In the current work we review and introduce evidence that preference and valence judgments about stimuli in one's environment are also driven, at least in part, by the motor system.We begin by turning to research showing that the active bodyby way of specific facial expressions, head movements, and approach-avoidance arm movements-impacts individuals' valence and preference judgments of both valenced (i.e., with an inherent emotional content) and non-valenced stimuli. We then introduce evidence that, even when a person is not moving or has no explicit intention to act, the motor system can drive preferences for objects in one's environment.Before we begin, it is important to be explicit about what we mean by terms such as preference and how they are connected to related terms such as emotion. This will not only help you, the reader, to understand where we, the authors, are coming from, but it will help to clarify how we use these terms in relation to other articles in this special section. In our view, an individual's preference for a particular stimulus, or how much a AbstractThe position of individuals' bodies (e.g., holding a pencil in the mouth in a way that either facilitates or inhibits smiling musculature) can influence their emotional reactions to the stimuli they encounter, and can even impact their explicit preferences for one item over another. In this article we begin by reviewing the literature demonstrating these effects, explore mechanisms to explain this body-preference link, and introduce new work from our lab that asks whether one's bodily or motor experiences might also shape preferences in situations where the body is not contorted in a particular position, or when there is no intention to act. Such work suggests that one consequence of perceiving an object is the automatic and covert motor simulation of acting on this object. This, in turn, provides individuals with information about how easy or hard this action would be. It transpires that we like to do what is easy, and we also prefer objects that are easier to act on. The notion that judgments of object likeability are driven by motoric information furthers embodied cognition theories by demonstrating that even our preferences are grounded in action.

We tested whether analogical training could help children learn a key principle of elementary engineering-namely, the use of a diagonal brace to stabilize a structure. The context for this learning was a construction activity at the Chicago Children's Museum, in which children and their families build a model skyscraper together. The results indicate that even a single brief analogical comparison can confer insight. The results also reveal conditions that support analogical learning.

Listeners are able to glean information from the gestures that speakers produce, seemingly without conscious awareness. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie this process.Research on human action understanding shows that perceiving another's actions results in automatic activation of the motor system in the observer, which then affects the observer's understanding of the actor's goals. We ask here whether perceiving another's gesture can similarly result in automatic activation of the motor system in the observer. In Experiment 1, we first establish a new procedure that uses listener response times to study how gesture impacts sentence comprehension. In Experiment 2, we use this procedure, in conjunction with a secondary motor task, to investigate whether the listener's motor system is involved in this process. We show that moving arms and hands (but not legs and feet) interferes with the listener's ability to use information conveyed in a speaker's hand gestures. Our data thus suggest that understanding gesture relies, at least in part, on the listener's own motor system.When we watch others act on the world, our own motor systems are activated, which, in turn, affects how we interpret the actors' goals (e.g., Buccino et al., 2001;Hamilton, Wolpert & Frith, 2004;Wilson, Collins & Bingham, 2005;Sebanz, Bekkering & Knoblich, 2006). Here we ask whether this same process takes place even when the actions we observe do not have a direct effect on the world, but rather impact the world indirectly through their communicative potential. When people speak, they often move their hands--they gesture--and listeners are able to glean substantive information from these gestures, although typically without being aware of doing so. Does watching a speaker who gestures activate our own motor system? Perception and action have been shown to be linked, both within an individual and across individuals. In one line of studies, participants must perceive and/or produce bilateral movements that are perceptually and motorically difficult. Without training, humans can easily perceive and produce movements that are either identical (e.g., simultaneously moving both pointer fingers left and right together-a 0-degree phase) or symmetric (e.g., simultaneously moving both pointer fingers in and out together-a 180-degree phase). Distinguishing or producing bilateral movements at any other phase is difficult, requires extensive practice, and falls apart once movements reach a threshold frequency. Within an individual, learning to perceive distinctions at difficult phases (perception) improves the ability to produce movements (action) at those phases-movements that otherwise would require extensive motor practice to master (Wilson, Snapp-Childs & Bingham, 2010; see also Bingham, Schmidt & Zaal, 1999;Zaal, Bingham & Schmidt, 2000). Conversely, learning to produce movements at particular phases, without visual feedback of one's own body, improves perceptual discrimination of those phases specifically (Hecht, Vogt & ...

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.,

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