Gesture Facilitates Children’s Creative Thinking

Elizabeth Kirk; Carine Lewis

doi:10.1177/0956797616679183

Gesture Facilitates Children’s Creative Thinking

Elizabeth Kirk^*, Carine Lewis

^*Corresponding author for this work

Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Gestures help people think and can help offer new ideas to problem solvers. We conducted two experiments exploring the self-oriented function of gesture in a novel domain; creative thinking. In Experiment 1 we explored the relationship between children’s spontaneous gesture production and their ability to generate novel uses for everyday items (Alternative Uses Task). There was a significant correlation between children’s creative fluency and their gesture production, with the majority of children’s gestures depicting an action upon the target object. Restricting children from gesturing did not significantly reduce their fluency. In Experiment 2 we encouraged children to gesture and this significantly boosted their creative idea generation. These findings demonstrate that gestures serve an important self-oriented function and can assist creative thinking.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	225-232
Number of pages	8
Journal	Psychological Science
Volume	28
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616679183
Publication status	Published - 13 Dec 2016

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2016. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details

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Cite this

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Gesture Facilitates Children’s Creative Thinking

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