The body posture of both the teacher and student have been found to affect the student’s ability to remember correctly. Linda Smith, of Indiana University, has been studying postures with the aid of robots and children.
The robots were programmed to map the name of an object to the position it was presented in. The robot was shown a unique object on its left and told what it was. This was then removed and another object shown to its right. When both objects were put in front of it the robot could distinguish between the objects, even when they moved around. However, if both were presented on the same side the robot could not tell them apart.
Human infants exhibited the same behaviour for the same tests, which Smith attributes to body positioning. She concludes that the shifting of your body can cause you to forget. She also plans to study cognition which will be done in a similar fashion, determining whether words and thoughts are represented by bodily movement. However it is yet to be shown that body posture affects learning in adults, as well as in infants.