“Hands-on creativity”: The role of co-speech gestures on exploring new ideas (360G-Wellcome-207069_Z_17_Z)

People spontaneously produce gestures when they speak. They do so to enhance listener’s understanding of the conveyed message but also to facilitate intra-cognitive processes such as retrieve words, organise ideas into utterances and reduce cognitive load. The present study aims to investigate if gestures can also help the exploration and generation of new ideas during speaking. If so, is it the physical movement per se or the depictive nature of the gestural movement that helps? To this end, we will compare creativity levels of participants’ speech outputs in three conditions: gesture prohibition, gesture allowance and production of meaningless hand movements. We expect to find more creative speech outputs (e.g., more lexically diverse) when speakers gesture compared to the other conditions. Such a finding would suggest that the gestural benefit occurs due to gestures’ depictive rather than motoric nature. It would also highlight the link between gesture and creative thinking, a finding that has significant implications for teaching and learning, and psychological interventions using creative engagement to enhance well-being.