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Category: Project

Description: Co-speech gestures have been proposed to strengthen sensorimotor knowledge related to objects’ weight and manipulability. In this pre-registered study (N =159) designed to provide a robust, direct, and detailed test of this proposal, participants practiced a problem-solving task with small and large objects that were designed to induce a size-weight illusion (i.e., objects weigh the same but are experienced as different in weight). Participants then explained the task with or without co-speech gesture, or completed a control task. Afterwards, participants judged the heaviness of objects from memory and then while holding them. Confirmatory analyses revealed that gesturing did not affect heaviness ratings. However, exploratory analyses revealed reliable correlations between participants’ heaviness judgments from memory and a) the amount of gestures produced that simulated actions, and b) the kinematics of the lifting phases of those gestures. These findings suggest that gestures emerge as sensorimotor imaginings that are governed by the agent’s history of sensorimotor interactions with the environment.