Action’s Influence on Thought: The Case of Gesture

Abstract

Recent research has shown that people’s actions can influence how they think. A separate body of research has shown that the gestures people produce when they speak can also influence how they think. In this article, we bring these two literatures together to explore whether gesture has an effect on thinking by virtue of its ability to reflect real-world actions. We first argue that gestures contain detailed perceptual-motor information about the actions they represent, information often not found in the speech that accompanies the gestures. We then show that the action features in gesture do not just reflect the gesturer’s thinking––they can feed back and alter that thinking. Gesture actively brings action into a speaker’s mental representations, and those mental representations then affect behavior––at times more powerfully than do the actions on which the gestures are based. Gesture thus has the potential to serve as a unique bridge between action and abstract thought.