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
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
Friday, October 13, 2023
Friday, March 5, 2021
How Color Influences Brain Activity
What if there was a way to know what we’re thinking just by looking at a person's brain map? A recent study was able to find specific regions in the brain that were active when certain colors were shown to the study groups. The researchers were able to know what colors the participants were shown based on which brain area was more active during the study. This study may be able to show us more about our visual perception on objects and how patterns can also have effects on our different brain regions.
Using MEG (Magnetoencephalography) researchers found that certain hues of colors activate different regions of the brain in participants. Pink, blue, green and orange were used in the study as well as shades of darker and lighter colors. Each color activated a specific region in the brain that allowed researchers to know which colors were being shown to the participant by looking at the brain maps of participants. The colors were also shown on a spiral shape to make it easier for participants to focus more attention on the colors being shown. This may be the reason behind the colors being shown were easier to be identified in brain maps.
There were 18 participants in the study and 8 colors were used, pink, blue, and orange, and 2 shades of each color, lighter and darker. Within hues there was not much of a difference between seeing the hues as darker or lighter, the brain region. For example, the brain region still perceived the color as orange and not much difference in darker or lighter hues. There were also similarities in detecting light hues of orange and pink which shows that some colors are perceived to be the same based on the hue. Overall, it was easier for participants to identify the darker hues over the light hues.
It would be interesting to see what other types of studies can be done with this research using MEG to view brain activity. Would researchers be able to see different brain region activity in object and pattern recognition being? What type of data can be gathered in language and word processing to see if certain words or sentences activate different regions of the brain? The studies can also show us more about our thought processes from thoughts to actions as well. Overall, this study can lead to many other studies such as color depth in objects we see every day, in how we interact with our environment on a day-to-day basis. The study can also show us that it can go beyond color perception research and into pattern recognition, or language and word processing.
“Color Space Geometry Uncovered with Magnetoencephalography” by Isabelle A. Rosenthal, Shridhar R. Singh, Katherine L. Hermann, Dimitrios Pantazis, Bevil R. Conway. Current Biology
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