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Category: Project

Description: The purpose of this project is to investigate the role of gestures that accompany silent thinking in children’s problem-solving. In our previous research we found that for adults who are confronted with a problem (e.g. Tower of Hanoi, chess), using pointing-gestures to think out the moves helped their performance. However, this was only the case for individuals who had difficulty keeping track of the problem-solving steps in their mind (i.e., those with a lower visual working memory capacity). In the current project we aim to conceptually replicate the previous findings by assessing whether gesturing can promote children’s problem-solving ability as well and how the benefit of gesturing relates to visual working memory capacity in children.