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Pouw, Wassenburg, de Koning, Hostetter, & Paas (preprint). Does Gesture Strengthen Sensorimotor Knowledge of Objects? The Case of the Size-Weight Illusion
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Description: Gestures have been proposed to strengthen sensorimotor knowledge of the objects they are about. Specifically, participants are slower to solve a problem when the weights of the task-relevant objects that they have gestured about have changed, suggesting that the gestures made the weights of the objects more salient. However, the previous work had low statistical power and did not test sensorimotor cognition directly (i.e., problem-solving performance was measured). The current study provides a more robust and direct test of the effects of hand gesture on sensorimotor cognition. In this pre-registered study (N = 159) participants practiced a problem-solving task with small and large objects that had been manipulated to induce a size-weight illusion (i.e., objects weigh the same but are experienced as different in weight). Participants then explained the task or completed a control task (control condition). Of those who explained the task, half were encouraged to gesture (gesture condition) and half were prohibited from gesturing (no-gesture condition). Afterwards, participants judged the heaviness of objects from memory and subsequently while holding them. Our analyses revealed strong evidence for no effects of condition on heaviness ratings based on memory or while holding. We did however conceptually replicate previous findings that gestures that simulated a previous problem-solving routine were related to recalled heaviness judgment. We propose gestures are governed by the same mechanism that governs weight estimations from memory. This is a system that is tuned to the agent’s history of sensorimotor interactions.