Medical X-Press – Staff Writer
“Encouraging children to use gestures as they think can help them come up with more creative ideas, according to research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our findings show that children naturally gesture when they think of novel ways to use everyday items, and the more they gesture the more ideas they come up with,” say psychological scientist Elizabeth Kirk of the University of York. “When we then asked children to move their hands, children were able to come up with even more creative ideas.” Existing research has shown that gesture can help with some kinds of problem-solving. Kirk and colleague Carine Lewis of the University of Hertfordshire hypothesized that it might specifically help us come up with creative or alternative uses for everyday items.”(more)