Hidden knowledge revealed and enhanced by gesture

We often assume that true understanding is conveyed through spoken speech rather than gesture, but new research shows that "talking with your hands" can not only reveal different information than spoken language, it can be both more correct and yield better learning.

Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have previously shown that spontaneous gesture during speech contains a form of implicit knowledge -- knowledge that cannot be verbally reported, but nonetheless affects performance. Similar phenomena are known as knowledge-action dissociations; for example, in Piagetian conservation tasks, children will fail to verbally recognize that two differently-spaced sets of objects actually contain the same number each, but will sometimes nonetheless point out their one-to-one correspondence in their spontaneous and simultaneous gesturing. This might be seen as a cognitive counterpart to blindsight, in which cortically-blind subjects nonetheless possess some "implicit" visual perception, revealed only when a ball is thrown at them or they are otherwise instinctively compelled to respond to a visual object.

Read full story in Developing Intelligence.