The goal of the present study is to determine how to incorporate social cues such as gesturing in animated pedagogical agents (PAs) for online multimedia lessons in ways that promote student learning. In 3 experiments, college students learned about synaptic transmission from a multimedia narrated presentation while their eye movements were tracked and subsequently took learning outcome tests. In Experiments 1 and 2, students who had a gesturing PA added to the screen performed significantly better on learning outcome tests of transfer (ds = 0.77 and 0.80) and retention (ds = 1.16 and 1.00) an...
