The Role of Gestures in Spatial Explanations: Change in Spatial Perspective

The goal of this paper is to investigate the role of gestures in verbal descriptions of a spatial layout. Participants listened to a text describing a fictional environment from the route or survey perspective, and then asked to explain the pairs of landmarks, some with route perspective (directions from one landmark to another) and other with survey perspective (to provide the locations of two landmarks). Analysis of gestures during the explanation in Experiment 1 revealed that speakers who learned from the route perspective produced more gestures when the explanation involved the survey perspective. The type of increased gestures was consistent with the perspective that the task demanded. These results support the Information Packaging Hypothesis. The fact that the effect of changing from survey perspective to route perspective was not found in Experiments 1 and 2 indicated an advantage of the survey text over the route text.