The communicative advantage: how kinematic signaling supports semantic comprehension
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The communicative advantage: how kinematic signaling supports semantic comprehension James P. Trujillo1,2 · Irina Simanova1 · Harold Bekkering1 · Asli Özyürek2,3 Received: 7 January 2019 / Accepted: 2 May 2019 © The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Humans are unique in their ability to communicate information through representational gestures which visually simulate an action (eg. moving hands as if opening a jar). Previous research indicates that the intention to communicate modulates the kinematics (e.g., velocity, size) of such gestures. If and how this modulation influences addressees’ comprehension of gestures have not been investigated. Here we ask whether communicative kinematic modulation enhances semantic comprehension (i.e., identification) of gestures. We additionally investigate whether any comprehension advantage is due to enhanced early identification or late identification. Participants (n = 20) watched videos of representational gestures produced in a more(n = 60) or less-communicative (n = 60) context and performed a forced-choice recognition task. We tested the isolated role of kinematics by removing visibility of actor’s faces in Experiment I, and by reducing the stimuli to stick-light figures in Experiment II. Three video lengths were used to disentangle early identification from late identification. Accuracy and response time quantified main effects. Kinematic modulation was tested for correlations with task performance. We found higher gesture identification performance in more- compared to less-communicative gestures. However, early identification was only enhanced within a full visual context, while late identification occurred even when viewing isolated kinematics. Additionally, temporally segmented acts with more post-stroke holds were associated with higher accuracy. Our results demonstrate that communicative signaling, interacting with other visual cues, generally supports gesture identification, while kinematic modulation specifically enhances late identification in the absence of other cues. Results provide insights into mutual understanding processes as well as creating artificial communicative agents.
Introduction Human communication is multimodal, utilizing various signals to convey meaning and interact with others. Indeed, humans may be uniquely adapted for knowledge transfer, with the ability to signal the intention to interact as well as to manifest the knowledge that s/he wishes to communicate Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01198-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * James P. Trujillo [email protected] 1
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Montessorilaan 3, B.01.25, 6525GR Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
(Csibra & Gergely, 2006). This
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