Communicating hands: ERPs elicited by meaningful symbolic hand postures

Thomas C. Gunter, Patric Bach

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

80 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Meaningful and meaningless hand postures were presented to subjects who had to carry out a semantic discrimination task while electrical brain responses were recorded. Both meaningful and control sets of hand postures were matched as closely as possible. The ERPs elicited by meaningless hand postures showed an anteriorly distributed N300 and a centro-posteriorly distributed N400 component. The N300 probably reflects picture-specific processes, whereas the N400-effect probably reflects processing in an amodal semantic network. The scalp-distribution of the N400-effect, which is more posterior than usually reported in picture processing, suggests that the semantic representations of the concepts expressed by meaningful hand postures have similar properties to those of abstract words.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)52-56
Number of pages5
JournalNeuroscience Letters
Volume372
Issue number1-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Nov 2004

Keywords

  • Emblems
  • Gestures
  • Hand postures
  • N300
  • N400
  • Nonverbal communication

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