New Research Points to the Benefits of Being all Fingers and Thumbs

Gesturing with our hands helps us to solve spatial visualisation problems, a skill that is necessary in many professions and in our daily lives, according to research by University of Birmingham psychologists published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Dr Mingyuan Chu and Dr Sotaro Kita. Spatial visualisation is the visual technique that a medical doctor would use to look at an x-ray and imagine a patient's bone structure from different angles or an architect uses to imagine how a building might look from a plan. It is the tool that we use, for example, when we are deciding how to re-arrange our living room without actually moving the furniture. In the study the researchers asked groups of students to perform tasks in which objects presented on a computer screen had to be mentally rotated. Firstly 132 students were asked to solve the mental rotation task while the researchers observed spontaneous hand gestures using a hidden camera. They found that the number of hand gestures increased as the problems became harder. Secondly 66 students were divided into three groups.