Goldin-Meadow Susan, Beilock Sian L
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2010 Nov;5(6):664-74. doi: 10.1177/1745691610388764.
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.
最近的研究表明，人们的行为会影响他们的思维方式。另一项独立的研究表明，人们说话时做出的手势也会影响他们的思维方式。在本文中，我们将这两类文献结合起来，探讨手势是否因其反映现实世界行为的能力而对思维产生影响。我们首先认为，手势包含有关其所代表动作的详细感知运动信息，这些信息通常在伴随手势的言语中找不到。然后我们表明，手势中的动作特征不仅仅反映了做手势者的思维——它们可以反馈并改变这种思维。手势积极地将动作带入说话者的心理表征中，而这些心理表征随后会影响行为——有时比手势所基于的动作影响更强烈。因此，手势有可能成为行动与抽象思维之间独特的桥梁。
