Coaches often use pointing gestures alongside their speech to reinforce their message and emphasize important concepts during instructional communications, but the impact of simultaneous pointing gestures and speech on learners’ recall remains unclear. We used eye-tracking and recalled performance to investigate the impact of a coach’s variously timed pointing gestures and speech on two groups of learners’ (novices and experts) visual attention and recall of tactical instructions. Participants were 96 basketball players (48 novice and 48 expert) who attempted to recall instructions about the evolution of a basketball game system under two teaching conditions: speech accompanied by gestures and speech followed by gestures. Overall, the results showed that novice players benefited more from instructional speech accompanied by gestures than from speech followed by gestures alone. This was evidenced by their greater visual attention to the diagrams, demonstrated through a higher fixation count and decreased saccadic shifts between the coach and the diagrams. Additionally, they exhibited improved recall and experienced reduced mental effort, despite having the same fixation time on the diagrams and equivalent recall time. Conversely, experts benefited more from instructional speech followed by gestures, indicating an expertise reversal effect. These results suggest that coaches and educators may improve their tactical instructions by timing the pairing of their hand gestures and speech in relation to the learner’s level of expertise.

Tracing gestures are hand movements designed to mimic or simulate specific actions. This study examined the effects of incorporating these gestures with mental imagery (dynamic imagery) versus using mental imagery alone (static imagery) on learning tactical movements in basketball. In addition, it investigated how the effectiveness of these techniques varies with players’ levels of expertise (expert vs. novice) and the timing of testing (immediate vs. delayed). The findings indicated that novices practicing dynamic mental imagery consistently outperformed those using only static imagery in both immediate and delayed tests. In contrast, although experts showed comparable benefits from both techniques in the immediate test, dynamic imagery proved significantly more beneficial in the delayed test. These results emphasize the important role that the combination of mental imagery and tracing gestures plays in enhancing learning performance, with the effects varying based on testing time and expertise level.