Can gesture establish an independent communication channel?

Abstract

There exist two types of communication channels in human communication: verbal channel and nonverbal channel. Gesture is one of the most often-used channels in nonverbal communication since people frequently use gestures to communicate. In order to investigate whether gestures can establish an independent communication channel in human dyadic communication, authors conducted an experiment using a maze exploration task for observing human's behaviors that occurred in gestural communication. In the experiment, participants were grouped into pairs and each pair includes one instructor and one actor. The instructor was asked to instruct the actor to move along a prescribed map by only gesture. As the results of the experiment, all participants adopted some types of deictic gesture to establish a basic protocol, and some of them also tried some mimetic gestures and arbitrary gestures to improve the efficiency of the communication. By analyzing experimental results, it can be inferred that gestures can be used to establish an independent communication channel by building basic protocols in dyadic nonverbal communication. Since the feedback from the actor to the instructor was limited to movement, instructors' gestures sometimes could not be understood by some actors in complex tasks. In this case some actors tried to respond using other channel other than the movement or use gesture to confirm the meaning of the instructions. Further analysis is still needed to discover the detailed process of how the communication protocol is established and how people adapt their behavior to the partner. So that the result can be used to develop a robot which can hopefully communicate with human beings in natural way by establishing nonverbal communication channel.