Perspective determines the production and interpretation of pointing gestures
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BRIEF REPORT
Perspective determines the production and interpretation of pointing gestures Oliver Herbort 1
&
Lisa-Marie Krause 1 & Wilfried Kunde 1
Accepted: 27 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Pointing is a ubiquitous means of communication. Nevertheless, observers systematically misinterpret the location indicated by pointers. We examined whether these misunderstandings result from the typically different viewpoints of pointers and observers. Participants either pointed themselves or interpreted points while assuming the pointer’s or a typical observer perspective in a virtual reality environment. The perspective had a strong effect on the relationship between pointing gestures and referents, whereas the task had only a minor influence. This suggests that misunderstandings between pointers and observers primarily result from their typically different viewpoints. Keywords Pointing gestures . Pointing production and interpretation . Deictic reference . Virtual reality
Introduction Pointing gestures are ubiquitous in human communication and play an increasing role in human-robot interactions or interactions in virtual environments (Butterworth, 2003; Roth 2001; Wong & Gutwin, 2014). While pointing gestures are complemented by speech in some situations, people tend to rely mostly on pointing in other situations, for example when referring to non-salient objects at hard-to-describe positions – such as a star in the night sky or an animal hidden in the landscape. However, in such situations it also becomes apparent that initial attempts to rely mainly on pointing often fail to guide another person’s attention to a referent. One reason why it is hard to communicate a precise location with pointing gestures is that pointing gestures are systematically misinterpreted by observers (Bangerter & Oppenheimer, 2006; Herbort & Kunde, 2016; Wnuczko & Kennedy, 2011). For example, observers typically judge pointing gestures to be directed at a higher position than intended by the pointer, apparently because the production and interpretation of pointing gestures accord to different
* Oliver Herbort [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, Würzburg, Germany
geometric rules. An example is shown in Fig. 1a: Pointers typically put the index finger on the line between their eyes and the referent. In contrast, observers tend to extrapolate the line defined by the arm and fingers when seeing a pointer from the side, thus overestimating the referent’s height. This raises the question why the production and interpretation of pointing gestures follow different rules. Many factors could potentially elicit differences in pointing production and interpretation. For example, pointers and observers differ with respect to their knowledge of the referent’s location, might attend different locations, and produce different types of movements. In this paper, however, we specifically test the hypothesis that differences in the production and interpretation
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