Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield is part of the Psychology department at Loyola University Chicago. On September 24, she presented her research on her 2018 article titled Gesture help learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. Dr. Wakefield described how the main goal of the study was to provide insight as to how gesture plays a part in visual attention to aid learning. Visual patterns were studied in children who looked at instructional videos which included speech and gesture instruction, and only-speech instruction. Results demonstrated that children attending to speech and gesture instruction performed better when demonstrating what they learned after the video, than those who were presented with speech-alone instruction. This presents the claim that gesture regulates learning-related visual patterns. Furthermore, it suggests that when there is presence of gesturing, there is an increase in attention to speech, and thus, increase in attention efficacy.
Dr. Wakefield’s talk and findings are of great importance to the science field, as attention is a complex and intriguing topic to study. This is demonstrated through the article The Relationship Between Visual Attention and Visual Working Memory Encoding: A Dissociation Between Covert and Overt Orienting (2016) published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. This article presents a study regarding the relationship among visual attention and encoding of items in the visual working memory. The main findings depict that covert attention does not necessarily produce encoding of objects into the visual working memory, suggesting that attention and the working memory are separate system rather than one mechanism, as previously thought. Moreover, the results indicated that attention and the visual working memory depend how the orienting behavior is demanded. In other words, covert shifts of attention to objects does not interfere with working memory performance.
The results of the latter relate to Dr. Wakefield’s study in several ways. In Dr. Wakefield’s research, the focus is on visual patterns of the eye to record attention shifts between gesture and non-gesture instruction. It involves overt attention, and the results proved that more movement towards a target (the gesture), help children learn more efficiently. Thus, encoding is occurring effectively at the visual working memory level. The difference between the two studies is that Wakefield’s explicitly seeks for overt attention, while the other depicts how covert attention do not interfere with working memory performance. The 2016 study goes more in-depth regarding attention mechanisms, as they focus on how attention is processed in working memory, while Wakefield’s study seeks to prove benefits of gesture-related attention on working memory. Without a doubt, both studies are very insightful as to the existing connection between visual attention and working memory. They shed light to how cognitive processes function in our brain, and these should be further studied for us to comprehend and appreciate.
Tas, A. C., Luck, S. J., & Hollingworth, A. (2016). The relationship between visual attention and visual working memory encoding: A dissociation between covert and overt orienting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Retrieved from https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2016-06216-001.pdf
Wakefield, E., Novack, M. A., Congdon, E. C., Franconeri, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. Wiley Developmental Science. Retrieved from http://visualthinking.psych.northwestern.edu/publications/WakefieldGesture2018.pdf
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