The engaging nature of interactive gestures

Abstract

The social interactions that we experience from early infancy often involve actions that are not strictly instrumental but engage the recipient by eliciting a (complementary) response. Interactive gestures may have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems either because of their intrinsically engaging nature or as a result of extensive social learning. We compared these two hypotheses in a series of behavioral experiments by presenting individuals with interactive gestures that call for motor responses to complement the interaction ('hand shaking', 'requesting', 'high-five') and with communicative gestures that are equally socially relevant and salient, but do not strictly require a response from the recipient ('Ok', 'Thumbs up', 'Peace'). By means of a spatial compatibility task, we measured the interfering power of these task-irrelevant stimuli on the behavioral responses of individuals asked to respond to a target. Across three experiments, our results showed that the interactive gestures impact on response selection and reduce spatial compatibility effects as compared to the communicative (non-interactive) gestures. Importantly, this effect was independent of the activation of specific social scripts that may interfere with response selection. Overall, our results show that interactive gestures have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems, possibly because they entail an automatic preparation to respond that involuntary engages the motor system of the observers. We discuss the implications from a developmental and neurophysiological point of view.

Multimodal language in child-directed versus adult-directed speech

“…We used G*Power 3.1.9.2 programme to calculate our target sample size (Faul et al, 2007). The target sample size was estimated as 66 when we set the effect size as .20 based on the previous research (Curioni et al, 2020). Our sample consisted of 66 undergraduate and graduate students who were native Turkish speakers ( M age = 21.05, SD age = 1.67, 60 female).…”

Comunicación Emocional No Verbal en La Infancia, Análisis en El Aula Desde La Metodología Observacional

“…Los gestos se integran dentro de un proceso de relación social, en el cual, el empleo de los signos no verbales hacen parte de la interacción, las relaciones y los vínculos con los demás, la organización y en general con el control de la comunicación, la cual está cargada de un alto valor sociocultural que agrega información al mensaje transmitido (Alibali y Kita, 2010;Cestero, 2015, Curioni et al, 2020Fossa, 2019;Goldin-Meadow, 2005;Özçalışkan et al, 2016;Waters y Beck, 2015). Ahora bien, los gestos se pueden clasificar en: emblemas, ilustradores, reguladores, adaptadores y señales de afecto (Knapp y Hall, 2009), en este sentido, estos fueron los aspectos abordados en el presente estudio.…”

The Impact of Response Type on Affordance and Spatial Compatibility Effects in Human and Object Interactions

“…One critical difference distinguishing social affordances from object affordances is that, during social interactions, one is required to reciprocate the other individual's action (e.g., extending their right hand for a handshake) not with the spatially compatible response (the left hand), but the hand that complements (the right hand) the interaction partner's action. Curioni et al (2020) used images of individuals performing either interactive (e.g., handshake) or communicative (e.g., thumbs up) gestures with either the right hand, which was located in the left side of the screen since the body of the individual was centered, or the left hand, which was located in the right side of the screen. The spatial compatibility effect that resulted from the location of the gesture hand in the screen was found to be lower in the communicative than in the interactive gesture condition, which indicated that interactive gestures led to a slight facilitation of the spatially incompatible, but the affordance-compatible hand.…”

“…They revealed that although both stimulus types produced strong spatial compatibility effects, the directional compatibility effect, which was in line with social affordances, occurred only for the handshake gestures. It is important to note that the type of response administration might be a critical factor in the emergence of the social affordance effect, since faster complementary hand responses were observed in studies using key release as responses (Faber et al, 2016;Farmer et al, 2021;Flach et al, 2010;Liepelt et al, 2010), whereas the only study that used keypress responses reported the opposite pattern, showing faster responses for the spatially compatible, but affordance-incompatible hand responses (Curioni et al, 2020).…”