Electrophysiological and kinematic correlates of communicative intent in the planning and production of pointing gestures and speech

David Peeters, Mingyuan Chu, Judith Holler, Peter Hagoort, Asli Özyürek

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)
10 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In everyday human communication, we often express our communicative intentions by manually pointing out referents in the material world around us to an addressee, often in tight synchronization with referential speech. This study investigated whether and how the kinematic form of index finger pointing gestures is shaped by the gesturer's communicative intentions and how this is modulated by the presence of concurrently produced speech. Furthermore, we explored the neural mechanisms underpinning the planning of communicative pointing gestures and speech. Two experiments were carried out in which participants pointed at referents for an addressee while the informativeness of their gestures and speech was varied. Kinematic and electrophysiological data were recorded online. It was found that participants prolonged the duration of the stroke and poststroke hold phase of their gesture to be more communicative, in particular when the gesture was carrying the main informational burden in their multimodal utterance. Frontal and P300 effects in the ERPs suggested the importance of intentional and modality-independent attentional mechanisms during the planning phase of informative pointing gestures. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the complex interplay between action, attention, intention, and language in the production of pointing gestures, a communicative act core to human interaction.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2352-2368
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume27
Issue number12
Early online date30 Oct 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2015

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
We thank Albert Russel for assistance in setting up the experiments, and Charlotte Paulisse for help in data collection.

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