When Less Is More: The Influence of Gesture Visibility on Attention and Learning

ABSTRACT In classroom interactions over video conferencing platforms, teachers and students gesture, but their bodies are neither physically copresent nor fully visible to each other. Do instructor gestures help learning in this context? We showed participants videos of professors lecturing spontaneously with unscripted co‐speech gestures. In some conditions, we edited this recording to mimic the Zoom lecture experience, cropping the video or removing the video altogether. Eye‐tracking analyses showed that participants paid significantly more visual attention to the partial gesture condition than to stimuli where the gesturing was fully visible, and they scored significantly higher on an immediate comprehension test if they had seen lectures in the partially visible condition. Multiple methods confirmed significant gesture loss in the partial video condition. We draw on a range of approaches to interpret our findings. This work raises further questions of mechanism for gesture's role in learning in varied instructional environments and embodied contexts.