Masks! The great debate extends into the classroom. Does mask-wearing aid or inhibit learning? One narrative asserts that masks weaken children's social skills and discourage their ability to learn language. An opinion piece written in the New York Times by Judith Danovitch, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Louisville, claims that masks may encourage learning. Her article, "Actually, Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Child Learn," claims that face coverings do not impact children's development. Danovitch calls attention to children in cultures and communities whose educators wear head coverings or masks regularly. In her experience, these children develop language and social skills similarly to kids in other cultures. Children who are congenitally blind learn to speak, read, and socialize as well. Her evidence portrays no slowing or alteration of development. Instead of looking at a teacher's mouth, Danovitch proposes that gesture and context fill in lost understanding. She even claims that mask-wearing may improve a child's self-control and focus. Danovitch cites research, saying more than half of the gaze time of a typically developed two-year-old is on the eyes rather than the mouth. In addition, children may develop a heightened ability to discern others' thoughts and emotions based on looking at their eyes alone. Thus, they may portray an increased level of emotional intelligence. However, does this piece, written by a professor and research psychologist, point at an imperative side of the mask debate, or does the inability to view full facial expressions impact how developing children learn?
A vast part of learning, especially language learning, is influenced by gesture. Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield, associate professor of neuroscience and developmental psychology at Loyola University Chicago, defines gesture as hand movements that accompany spoken language and express information through their form and trajectory. Gesture is vital and is even utilized by those who cannot see it. Dr. Wakefield explains that those who are blind person will gesture like a sighted individual. Gesture is natural, and there is an expansive collection of literature that supports gesture-based learning. Dr. Wakefield asserts that when teachers and children gesture, they retain that information for longer. Gestures aid across all developmental stages and all grade levels.
Gesture-based learning is so powerful that it does not matter whether the student or the teacher gestures; memory in either case is prolonged. Dr. Wakefield's work focuses on determining that gesture shapes visual attention. She tracked eye movements and confirmed that gesture draws the eye to a location but then asked: does it predict learning? In her experiment, a confederate teaches children about a missing addend in an equivalence problem. One intervention (or lesson taught) utilized gesture, the other did not. Both trials tracked children's eye movement. During the gesture trial, participants attended most to the gesture space (the math problem) and the confederate's mouth, their gaze correlating with the confederate's speech. In other words, during this learning event, children followed along with what the confederate taught by looking at her mouth and following along with the problem's steps via the confederate's gestures. In the trial without gesture, the children followed speech alone and spent less time following along with the problem. Dr. Wakefield concluded that learning with gestures allowed for a deepened learning event. Children who learned with gestures were better able to generalize this problem and apply it to other math problems than children who did not learn with gestures. Dr. Wakefield also completed another study asking about how gesture supported learning in a weaker language. Children were given two narratives about Tweety Bird and Sylvester - one in English, their stronger language, and one in Polish, their weaker language. Some narratives were assisted by gestures, and others were not. Wakefield and Zilenski found that children attended more to gestures when they accompanied the Polish (or weaker) language narrative and benefited more from these gestures. They could also recall more plot points from the weaker language if a matching gesture was associated with the explanation. Adults, too, completed the same trial, but it was found that children benefit more from gestures associated with language and communication than adults. Therefore, gestures support language learning and recall, especially for children. Gestures are vital, and these studies bolster Danovitch's claim that gesture impacts learning and attending to it is vital for context, content, and recall.
How, then does gesture and learning apply to masks and facial expressions? Does Dr. Wakefield's research correlate with Judith Donovtich's assertions that children learn and develop just as effectively by attending to gesture and context than facial expressions and the mouth? A study by Carmelo M. Vicario and Anica Newman from the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, highlights that facial expressions influence learners' attention to gestures. There is a body of research that supports "embodied cognition" theory or the concept that cognitive representations are facilitated by and firmed within a physical context. Thus, we physically simulate ideas to understand them better. Reed and Farah displayed in their 1995 study that physical simulation is an effective learning tool. Mimicry supports learning, too, but it also hinders upon social attitudes. Leighton et al. (2010) displayed that social attitudes directly and specifically affect mimicry, with pro-social priming producing a larger mimicry effect than anti-social priming. Social attitudes, specifically those with positive affect (positive emotions), affect our tendency to imitate behavior unconsciously. Due to these findings, Vicario and Newman hypothesized that pro-social (happy) as opposed to anti-social (angry) facial expressions influence the recognition of implicit social attitudes portrayed by a certain hand posture. Closed hand posture means an anti-social attitude, whereas open hand posture means a pro-social attitude. The trials tested this hypothesis by first projecting a hand posture on the screen. The participants were then shown a facial expression, which the researchers called an emotional primer. After the emotional primer, they were presented with another hand posture stimulus. When that popped up, they were to press one of two buttons, which identified if this hand posture was different or the same. In other words, the participants were asked to determine as fast as they could whether the test stimulus, a hand posture, a gesture, was the same as the ready signal, the first-hand posture on the screen. The results concluded that emotion and embodiment are linked - exposure to facial expression and varying social attitudes affect the recognition of hand gestures. It is not as simple as saying that priming a pro-social attitude means that gestures are better recognized. This experiment incorporated gestures with meanings such as the open hand or closed fist. These emotional gestures also impact our perception of social attitudes and may influence how we perceive the correlating verbal speech. Vicario and Newman assert that facial expressions may create an expectation for a pro-social or anti-social response, which affects the recognition of a hand gesture. This study displays that there is a relationship between emotion and gesture and that social attitude may be the link.
Emotion and gesture are linked. Facial expressions determine how the social attitudes of a gesture are perceived. This multi-faceted approach encourages better learning with more context and understanding. If one piece is disregarded, like not being able to see full facial expressions, then the meaning of that gesture is lost on the child, and the narrative the teacher is portraying becomes lost. The students must work harder to interpret that gesture's social attitudes and emotional meaning. Therefore, the gesture does not corroborate learning. Therefore, Donovitch's theory that educators' mask-wearing may encourage learning does not correlate with some gesture-based learning because facial expressions help facilitate that process. Understanding the social attitudes behind a gesture allow for increased learning. Further study could be conducted asking if pro-social attitudes and gestures encourage students to attend to them more than their anti-social counterparts. Do gestures linked with facial expressions promote specific affect (mood) and does certain affect encourage deeper learning and attending? Do certain emotional gestures that convey a certain mood also cause more attending because they portray something like happiness or sadness? Mask-wearing influences learning, especially gestured-based learning, because facial expressions affects students' perception of gesture.
References:
Vicario, C. M., & Newman, A. (2013). Emotions affect the recognition of hand gestures. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00906
Danovitch, J. (2021, August 18). Opinion | Actually, wearing a mask can help your child learn. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/opinion/masks-schools-covid.html
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield E. (2021). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of Co-Speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq#main
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