I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Unviersity of Rochester

My work investigates the role of hand gestures in human cognition. I am interested in what hand gestures reflect about one's cognitive processes, as well as the impact of hand gestures on concurrent cognitive processes. My work investigates the cognitive processing associated with gesture production and perception.

Gestures are pervasive behaviors, yet they are often overlooked, perhaps because they are not as "fancy" as speech. It's true that gestures don't have standards of form like those associated with speech. Most gestures are not part of a formal code, and their meaning depends on the available context rather than being derived from the form of the representation. However, gesture may enable speakers and listerners to capitalize on just these properties. For example, gesture may allow people to offload some of the cognitive effort required to produce and comprehend complex and abstract representations.

My previous work supports this idea. Even though speaking and gesturing requires the coordination of two complex behaviors, it appears that it is easier for speakers to produce speech and gesture together than it is to produce speech alone. In a dual-task paradigm, gesturing was associated with improved performance on a secondary working memory task, while not gesturing was associated with decreased performance on a secondary memory task (Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner, 2001). This was true for both children and adults. Furthurmore, the effect was independent of whether speakers were instructed not to gesture, or they spontaneously chose not to gesture. It appears that sometimes, doing two things at once may be more efficient than only doing one. This work suggests that gestures do not merely reflect ones ongoing cogntiive processing, but instead they may be influence these processes directly. Indeed, the results suggest that gesturing may facilitate the cognitive processes underlying communication.

This work received some publicity in the new media. My personal favorite was making it on to NPR:

From NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (November 17, 2001)

If your brain doesn't meet high demands
Here's some gestures to loosen your glands.
Put ‘em up in the air,
Shake ‘em like you don't care.
You'll be smarter if you use your _________.

I am presently investigating the mechanism by which gesture interacts with cognitive processing, as well as exploring the relationship between gesture production and other cognitive processes such as learning and memory.

Send me an email: swcook@bcs.rochester.edu.