Hand Gestures: They Say A Lot

Many people do not know that around half of human communication is done non-verbally. Body-language and gesturing have a substantial impact on the way information is communicated and perceived, whether intentional or not. Hand gestures are commonly used within conversation to better articulate what is being said and can even represent how the person is feeling. In sports, hand gestures can be seen in celebratory fist pumps or even self-deprecating slaps on the forehead. Either way, the audience is able to understand how the athlete is feeling without any word being spoken. 

Dr. Neumann, an author of the article "Neuropsychological functions of nonverbal hand movements and gestures during sports," studied the nonverbal hand movements of 15 right-handed elite male tennis players while competing in matches. This study examined whether or not these movements served different neurological functions associated with winning and losing. Through videotaping these athletes and performing extensive analysis on the film, it was found that right-handed tennis players make right-handed gestures significantly more frequently than left-handed gestures. "Rise" gestures, like fist pumps, were lateralized to the right hand in winning athletes while "on body" gestures, like slaps to the forehead, were lateralized to the left hand in losing athletes. This study also provided results that contradict the belief of winning athletes being more expressive in nonverbal behavior. It showed that, when analyzing all hand movements after both winning and losing points, hand gestures had virtually the same frequency. For further studies, it would be interesting to see if these results align with that of left-handed tennis players. What if they analyzed athletes of a different sport? Would hand gestures change in sports that do not involve holding a racket or something similar? 

This article and the neurophysiological topic of hand gestures relates to what Dr. Sarah Delmar presented to the Neuroscience Seminar class in late October. Dr. Delmar spoke to the class about how hand gestures promote learning in children, which struck the interest of many students. She explained that not only do hand gestures succeed in filling in "gaps" within communication, but promote a better understanding of what is being discussed for both the speaker and listener. Between Dr. Delmar's presentation and Dr. Neumann's article, it is clear that the communication found within body language, especially that of hand gestures, is invaluable to proficient communication. More people should implement hand gestures in conversation as it provides a more well-rounded understanding for everyone involved.

Work Cited

Neumann, N., Drewes, V., Konstantinidis, I., Reinecke, K. H. C., Lausberg, H., & Helmich, I. (2022). Neuropsychological functions of nonverbal hand movements and gestures during sports. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 34(3), 362–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2021.1998075

Interspecies Gesture Recognition Across Domains

    Gestures play a crucial role in communication, serving as movements that complement speech both temporally and semantically. Through their unique forms of movement, gestures not only represent speech but also contribute to the understanding of both the speaker and the audience, influencing memory capabilities. The effectiveness of gestures hinges on the audience and speakers' reliance on their clarifying and memory-enhancing capabilities. In today's diverse society, where a standard language is absent even among a singular species, gestures become paramount in providing communication cues globally. 

    In a world where there is no standard language among a species, gesture is paramount to giving people communication cues worldwide. As there is no common language between a singular species, it is no wonder that there is no common language that exists in an interspecies manner. The study of gestures becomes immensely powerful in such scenarios. In the science journal "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism," Dr. Wakefield et al. explore the significance of gesture and language in terms of bettering the understanding of individuals between two language barriers. They study the modulating effects of language proficiency on the utility of communicative gestures. To accomplish this task they directed 17 Polish-English children (ages 6-8) to watch videos with scripted gestures, while their eye movements were tracked. They were then asked to recall the premise of the videos in great detail while their gestures were later tracked and coded. They determined that matching gestures were significant in assisting with specific recall. They also determined that visual attention also played a crucial role in the children's ability to recall. 

    The importance of gestures extends beyond human communication to interspecies interactions. Within the article “Humans Can Recognize and understand chimpanzee and bonobo gestures,” data reveals that intentional gesture communication outside of the human language exists. Many of these gestures are expressed by non-human apes, including distantly related apes such as chimpanzees and orangutans. The article speaks of a study that found that humans who visually fixate on the animal's gestures are able to understand the gestures with an over 50% accuracy rate. Providing the participants with additional information as to what the ape was doing, something that would often be divulged in language, made the number of correct gestures interpreted exponentially greater. 

    In conclusion, the study's results highlight the vital role of gestures in both interhuman and interspecies communication. Just as gestures enhance speech across different human languages, they prove indispensable in bridging communication gaps between species.

References:   

    Science X. (2023, January 24). Humans can recognize and understand chimpanzee and bonobo gestures. Phys.org; Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2023-01-humans-chimpanzee-bonobo-gestures.html

    

    Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures, PLoS

Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001939

    

    Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43(43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq

Gesture Utilization Across Species Lines

Gesture is a common utilization in speech, to describe and elaborate on what is being said verbally. It may even come so naturally to us that we don’t realize the extent of the impact it has on our communication. In children, gestures are subconsciously used to enhance memory and learning in the long term. It is believed that the mental mechanisms of learning, speech, and gesture are all related to each other in intricate and important ways.

For the research article “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” by Natalia Zielinski and Elizabeth Wakefield, a study was completed that tested how much the addition of gesture benefitted a listener, based on age and language proficiency. The subjects, 17 bilingual children between the ages of six and eight, were read a story in one of two languages -- English or Polish -- which was accompanied by no gesture, matched gesture, or mismatched gesture. Matched gesture is redundant with speech, essentially repeating what was said, but in gesture. Mismatched gesture is gesture that provides additional information to what was said, rather than information found in the speech. The children were then asked to reproduce the story points, which produced quantifiable recall scores. The results of the study show that all of the children, who were reported as being more proficient in English, remembered the most English story points without gesture, and the most Polish story points were remembered when in conjunction with matched gesture. In the language with lower proficiency, the kids used the gesture to help determine the meaning of what was being said. This shows that gesture deeply benefits language learning.

In a New York Times article recently released called “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?” by Sonia Shah, a very similar idea is addressed. An important part of the article addresses Cat Hobaiter, a scientist who works with great apes, some of our closest living relatives, and studies the gestures of her subjects. In the gestures recorded between the great apes she studies, a decently high amount are actually legible to us humans. Hobaiter has used her study techniques on pre-verbal children, toddlers of one or two years of age, and found 40-50 matching gestures that indicated the same, or very similar meanings between species. She also put videos of ape gestures online for adult humans to try to decode or define, and the correct responses from people was found at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance”, as Hobaiter and her fellows reported in a paper for PLOS Biology.

Though these articles address different species, and different reasons for gesture, they match in the idea that gesture is subconscious, and has legitimate meaning in use. Whether gesture is the main source of communication, or just an additional resource, research from around the world is concluding that gesture plays an important role in communication.




Sources

Shah, Sonia. “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/magazine/animal-communication.html.




Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43(43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq