Lending a helping hand to hearing:
How the brain extracts information from nonverbal movements to improve learning
Abstract
Over 60% of the information that we gather from others during face-to-face communication comes from their “nonverbal” movements. With a focus on face and hand gestures, I review research that demonstrates that such movements dramatically facilitate speech perception, language comprehension, learning, and retention of learned material. I then review research showing how the brain makes use of it’s own embodied experience to extract this information and achieve these performance gains. Taken together, this work suggests that more embodied experiences should be implemented in educational settings and that this is especially important at this time of increasing virtualization of learning.