Mark: Cathy Marshall at Xerox PARC originally started speaking about information gardening. She developed an early tool that’s the inspiration for the Tinderbox map view, in which you would have boxes but no lines. It was a spatial hypertext system, a system for connecting things by placing them near each other rather than drawing a line between them. Very interesting abstract representational problem, but also it turned out to be tremendously useful.

The study’s authors suggest that this discrepancy may emerge fromdifferences in boys’ and girls’ experience: boys are more likely to play withspatially oriented toys and video games, they note, and may become morecomfortable making spatial gestures as a result. Another study, this oneconducted with four-year-olds, reported that children who were encouraged togesture got better at rotating mental objects, another task that draws heavily onspatial-thinking skills. Girls in this experiment were especially likely to benefitfrom being prompted to gesture.

People who are fluent in sign language, as Cooke is, have beenfound to have an enhanced ability to process visual and spatial information. Suchsuperior performance is exhibited by hearing people who know sign language, aswell as by the hearing impaired—suggesting that it is the repeated use of astructured system of meaning-bearing gestures that helps improve spatialthinking.

I tell her that it involves spatial awareness and planning ahead.