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Do speech disfluencies and gestures merely help us articulate our thoughts, or can they also shape how we reflect on those thoughts?
Our study examined the link among speech disfluencies, hand gestures, and metacognitive processes. To investigate the role of language-related cues in metacognition, we designed a task where participants answered general knowledge questions (e.g., “How many eyes does a bee have?”) while thinking aloud. After each response, they rated their confidence in their answer.
Results showed that higher disfluency (e.g., “uh” or “um”) during answering the question was linked to lower retrospective confidence ratings, while spontaneous gesture use (e.g., forming a circle to represent a bee’s eye) was associated with higher confidence after giving a response.
Strikingly, when gestures and disfluencies were higher in each trial, participants reported even greater confidence in their answers. These patterns emerged independent of answer accuracy. Our findings suggest that, just as gestures aid in structuring our thinking, they may also influence how we evaluate our own thinking (i.e., metacognition), sometimes misleadingly so.
One way to make sense of this is to think about how effort shapes confidence. Sometimes effort feels like a struggle (making us doubt ourselves), while other times it reflects motivation (making us feel more confident). In this study, gestures may have acted as a sign of confidence. People gestured more when they felt sure (a top-down effect), but the act of gesturing itself may have fed back into their thinking, reinforcing that confidence (a bottom-up effect). This suggests gestures can play a two-way role: Reflecting how we feel and actively shaping it.
Our results also indicate that disfluencies function as cues for the metacognitive system, signaling uncertainty regardless of actual performance. When gestures are added into the picture, they might create a compensatory sense of fluency, counterbalancing the uncertainty signaled by disfluencies. The motor activity triggered by speech errors could serve as a correction mechanism, ultimately informing the metacognitive system and increasing confidence.
These language-related cues (i.e., gestures and disfluencies) may therefore serve as cues to shape how we judge our own thinking. Rather than metacognition driving these behaviors (e.g., producing gestures in response to difficulty), it might be the case that these behaviors themselves inform metacognitive evaluations.
Overall, our findings point to a nuanced interplay among gesture, disfluency, and metacognitive judgment. The way we move and hesitate does not just reflect our thinking; it can also shape how confident we feel about it. The observation that gestures mitigate the negative effect of disfluencies on confidence further supports the idea that metacognitive judgments arise from multiple, interacting sources of information.
