Lending a Hand to Imagery? The Impact of Visuospatial Working Memory Interference Upon Iconic Gesture Production in a Narrative Task

Visuospatial working memory is thought to be responsible for imagery generation (Cattaneo et al. in Imagery and spatial cognition: methods, models and cognitive assessment, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2006). This memory system was manipulated by varying visual perceptual input (see Baddeley and Andrade in Theories of memory, Psychology Press, Hove, 1998) in a narrative task in order to investigate the association between iconic gesture production and visuospatial working memory interference. Participants watched two short cartoon clips and were asked to relay a narrative about what they had seen in the videos to an experimenter. Participants were randomly assigned to relay their narrative while wearing video glasses with either a simple or complex moving image (unrelated to the cartoons) projected onto the lenses. It was hypothesized that if gesture production plays a role in facilitating visuospatial working memory resource activation, then participants in the complex visual distractor condition would display a higher rate of gesture production. Participants in the complex visual distractor condition gestured significantly more than participants in the simple visual distractor condition. These results are interpreted as lending support to the argument that iconic gestures may play a functional role in activating visuospatial working memory resources during a narrative task. Since visuospatial working memory is thought to support imagery, these results also suggest that gesture production may facilitate imagery generation.     

Seeing is believing: Facial appearance,credibility, and attitude change

One-hundred twenty-eight subjects (64 female, 64 male) viewed either a babyfaced or maturefaced female speaker delivering a persuasive communication, and also received information designed to make the speaker seem either untrustworthy or inexpert. Subjects indicated how much they agreed with the speaker's position and completed other measures concerning her appearance and their perceptions of her speech. Babyfaced speakers induced more agreement with their position than did maturefaced speakers when trustworthiness was in question, presumably because babyfaced speakers still appeared honest due to their babyish facial features. Conversely, maturefaced speakers produced more attitude agreement as compared to babyfaced speakers when expertise was questioned, perhaps because knowledgeability was still communicated via their mature countenance. Attitude change was not related to perceived likability, age, attractiveness, or communication skills of the speakers, or subjects' interest in the topic.Over 80 million people watched at least one of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon television debates. Those who listened to them on the radio tended to think Richard Nixon had outdone the youthful, inexperienced JFK. The Republican's words carried more weight. Those who watched on television, however, proclaimed Kennedy the winner. His words were less important than his warmth [and] his sincerity. ... all of these qualities came across on television.—Krauss, in Davis & Baran (1981, pp. 103–104)     

Immediate Memory for Mismatched Speech and Representational Gesture Across Development

Two experiments examined how 7- and 8-year-old children, 9- and 10-year-old children, and adults process mismatched, task-related speech and gesture differently as a function of development. Participants watched videotapes of children speaking and gesturing about the concept of conservation. Using a recognition paradigm, we assessed immediate memory for information conveyed in mismatched speech and gesture. In Experiment 1, we used recognition of verbal statements to probe participants' memory, whereas in Experiment 2, we used recognition of gestural statements to probe memory. When probed with verbal statements in Experiment 1, 9- and 10-year-old children failed to retrieve gestured information. When probed with gestural statements in Experiment 2, 9- and 10-year-old children failed to retrieve verbal information. In contrast, the younger children and adults showed retrieval of both verbal and gestural information across both recognition methods in Experiments 1 and 2. These results suggest a U-shaped function with the 9- and 10-year-old children showing a limitation in the ability to process contradictory messages simultaneously conveyed in two modalities. Implications for identifying a transitional period in the development of representational skills are discussed.     

How What We See and What We Know Influence Iconic Gesture Production

In face-to-face communication, speakers typically integrate information acquired through different sources, including what they see and what they know, into their communicative messages. In this study, we asked how these different input sources influence the frequency and type of iconic gestures produced by speakers during a communication task, under two degrees of task complexity. Specifically, we investigated whether speakers gestured differently when they had to describe an object presented to them as an image or as a written word (input modality) and, additionally, when they were allowed to explicitly name the object or not (task complexity). Our results show that speakers produced more gestures when they attended to a picture. Further, speakers more often gesturally depicted shape information when attended to an image, and they demonstrated the function of an object more often when they attended to a word. However, when we increased the complexity of the task by forbidding speakers to name the target objects, these patterns disappeared, suggesting that speakers may have strategically adapted their use of iconic strategies to better meet the task’s goals. Our study also revealed (independent) effects of object manipulability on the type of gestures produced by speakers and, in general, it highlighted a predominance of molding and handling gestures. These gestures may reflect stronger motoric and haptic simulations, lending support to activation-based gesture production accounts.     

If You Want People to Listen to You,Tell a Story

We hypothesized that (a) when people share a meaningful story, as opposed to when they share information, they make their partner listen well, and (b) that narrative-induced listening is positively associated with speakers’ psychological safety and negatively associated with their social anxiety. In Study 1 (N = 45), we showed that a meaningful story is perceived much more as a narrative and higher in narrative quality than two types of informational-discourses (telling about daily routine and describing buildings). In Study 2 (N = 52), we randomly asked participants to either share a meaningful story or tell about their daily routine. The participants sharing a meaningful story reported that their interlocutor was a better listener, d = 0.61, 95% CI |0.32, 0.92|. In Study 3 (N = 42), we compared the effect of sharing a meaningful story to describing buildings, and replicated the results of Study 2, d = 1.10, 95% CI |0.61, 1.59|. Moreover, we found that the perceived listening, which was induced by the narrative, mediated the manipulation effects on psychological safety, and social anxiety. Thus, we concluded that when speakers share meaningful stories they make their partner listen well and consequently experience higher psychological safety and lower feelings of social anxiety.     

The context of infants' giving gestures in mother-infant dyads: Typical giving gestures and those contingent on exploration and play

This study aimed to focus on a niche that has not yet been investigated in infants' gesture studies that is the effect of the prior context of one specific gestural behavior (gives) on maternal behavior. For this purpose, we recruited 23 infants at 11 and 13 months of age yielded 246 giving gesture bouts that were performed in three contexts: typical when the object was offered immediately, contingent on exploration, and contingent on play. The analysis revealed that maternal responses to infants' giving gestures varied and were affected by their age and gesture context. Hence, mothers amended their responses according to the background that generated each gesture. The number of verbal responses to infants' giving gestures decreased as the infants aged, whereas the number of pretense responses increased. For infants aged 11 months, mothers generally provided motor responses to typical gestures. However, for infants aged 13 months, this trend declined and was replaced by a strong positive correlation between giving gestures contingent on play and verbal responses. We concluded that the type of activity with objects prior to employing giving gestures could enhance infants' symbolic skills because caregivers monitor the contingent act that yields the gesture that shapes their response.     

Video Deficit in Toddlers’ Object Retrieval: What Eye Movements Reveal About Online Cognition

The purpose of this study was to determine whether toddlers exhibit different eye‐movement patterns when watching real events versus video demonstrations in an object‐retrieval task. Twenty‐four‐month‐olds (N = 36) searched for a sticker on a felt board after watching an experimenter hide it behind a felt object in person or via video. Eye movements during the hiding event were recorded. Compared to those watching in‐person events, children watching video spent more time looking at the target location overall, yet they had relatively poor search performance. Visual attention to the target location predicted search performance in the video condition only; children who watched in‐person hiding events had high success rates even if they paid relatively little visual attention to the correct location. Findings are consistent with the hypothesis that toddlers process information more quickly for in‐person (versus video) events, enabling them to learn as well (or better) despite relatively low selective attention. Thus, relatively poor encoding, as well as memory retrieval, may underlie the video deficit.     

Teaching Children with Autism to Mand for Information Using “Why?” as a Function of Denied Access

The current study evaluated a procedure used to teach two children with autism to ask “why” questions maintained by causal information about an event. To increase the value of information as a reinforcer, the experimenter denied access to preferred items and did not provide a reason for the denial. Participants were taught to ask “why” questions and were provided with information that led them to access preferred items. To ensure that “why” questions only occurred when the information was valuable, we included a condition wherein access to preferred items was restricted but causal information was available. Both participants learned to ask “why” questions when causal information was not available and refrained from asking “why” questions when causal information was available.     

Cognitive Appraisal of Performance Capability in the Prevention of Drunken Driving: A Test of Self-Efficacy Theory

This experiment tested predictions derived from self-efficacy theory by exposing participants to one of two public service announcements based on either symbolic modeling or persuasive efficacy information. Each message was designed to heighten participants' self-efficacy to prevent a friend from driving drunk. Participants in the symbolic modeling condition viewed a public service announcement that demonstrated how to dissuade a friend from driving drunk, and those in the verbal persuasion condition viewed an announcement that only advocated performing the task. A control announcement mentioned the consequences of arrest for drunken driving but contained no efficacy information. Data were gathered during laboratory sessions and during follow-up interviews 1 month later. Overall, laboratory findings supported the hypothesized ordered effects for sources of efficacy information: Symbolic modeling engendered greater efficacy expectations and behavioral intentions than did persuasive efficacy information, which in turn surpassed the control condition on some measures of self-efficacy, but not on behavioral intentions where neither condition differed. Follow-up data indicated that participants in the efficacy-information treatments were equally successful at dissuading a friend from driving drunk, whereas the controls were not.     

Listening Is… Five Personal Worlds of Listening: An Auto-Ethnographic Approach

What is effective listening? This question intrigues both scholars and the general public. Theoretical explorations provide insight into the listening process as well as pragmatic guidelines for how to be a good listener. But even the most learned listening scholar will often fall back on the observation that they know effective listening best when they experience it.

Five renowned listening experts were asked to respond to the question, “What is listening from the perspective of your lived experience?” Each was asked to work from an auto-ethnographic methodology. The five lifeworlds described in this study represent their responses to this question and offer unique, individual ethnographic contexts describing the listening experience of each of the participants.     

The effects of nonverbal synchrony on message comprehension and persuasiveness

Previous research has not considered the effects of nonverbal synchronization by a speaker on message processing and acceptance by a listener. In this experiment, 178 subjects watched one of three versions of a message—high synchrony, minimal synchrony or dissynchrony—presented by one of two speakers. Receivers of the high synchrony message, which employed kinesic cues synchronized to the vocal/verbal stream, showed higher recall of the message and were more persuaded by it than receivers of the dissynchronous message, which had kinesic cues out of sync with the vocal/verbal stream. Results on three other dependent measures—credibility, distraction and counterarguing—were mixed but were generally consistent with the credibility-yielding and distraction-yielding formulations outlined.     

Aging and the Effects of Facial and Prosodic Cues on Emotional Intensity Ratings and Memory Reconstructions

Young (M = 23 years) and older (M = 77 years) adults' interpretation and memory for the emotional content of spoken discourse was examined in an experiment using short, videotaped scenes of two young actresses talking to each other about emotionally-laden events. Emotional nonverbal information (prosody or facial expressions) was conveyed at the end of each scene at low, medium, and high intensities. Nonverbal information indicating anger, happiness, or fear, conflicted with the verbal information. Older adults' ability to differentiate levels of emotional intensity was not as strong (for happiness and anger) compared to younger adults. An incidental memory task revealed that older adults, more often than younger adults, reconstruct what people state verbally to coincide with the meaning of the nonverbal content, if the nonverbal content is conveyed through facial expressions. A second experiment with older participants showed that the high level of memory reconstructions favoring the nonverbal interpretation was maintained when the ages of the participants and actresses were matched, and when the nonverbal content was conveyed both through prosody and facial expressions.     

Mental Imagery and Production of Hand Gestures While Speaking in Younger and Older Adults

Speech and conversational hand gestures were recorded during interviews of 23 younger (M = 21 years) and 19 older adults (M = 70 years). Three kinds of questions were used in order to activate either visual images, motor images, or no mental image (abstract topics). On average, the rate of gesture production did not differ in younger and older adults, but it was significantly influenced by imagery conditions. Gesture production was higher in the motor than in the visual imagery condition, and lowest in the abstract condition. A significant interaction between age and imagery conditions influenced the proportion of representational gestures, which were relatively less frequent in older adults, especially in the visual imagery condition. Content analysis of verbal responses showed that imagery values did not differ in younger and older adults, but that concrete words were less frequent in responses to abstract questions than in the two other conditions. The implications of these results concerning the mechanisms of gesture production and the age-related changes in conversational behavior are discussed.