How Gesture Benefits Learning: A Working Framework for Examining Attention and Memory Mechanisms

Spontaneous gestures produced alongside speech (co-speech gestures) help us think and learn. The gestures students produce in their explanations of a problem communicate their understanding of the problem to teachers, prompting teachers to provide instruction that leads to student progress. This cycle of teacher–student interaction showcases the beneficial role of gesture in teaching and learning. But how gesture confers this benefit is unclear. Here, we propose a framework for thinking about how attention and memory might mediate the link between gesture and learning. We speculate that bottom-up and top-down processes in attention and memory, as well as the interaction between the two, play a role in fashioning the beneficial effects gesture has on learning. By bridging the gesture and cognition literatures, we hope to motivate research investigating the mechanisms underlying gesture's impact on learning and to shed light on more effective use of gesture in natural settings, including education.