The engaging nature of interactive gestures.

Arianna Curioni,Lucia Maria Sacheli,Natalie Sebanz,Gunther Klaus Knoblich,Julie Jeannette Gros-Louis

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0232128

Abstract

The social interactions that we experience from early infancy often involve actions that are not strictly instrumental but engage the recipient by eliciting a (complementary) response. Interactive gestures may have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems either because of their intrinsically engaging nature or as a result of extensive social learning. We compared these two hypotheses in a series of behavioral experiments by presenting individuals with interactive gestures that call for motor responses to complement the interaction ('hand shaking', 'requesting', 'high-five') and with communicative gestures that are equally socially relevant and salient, but do not strictly require a response from the recipient ('Ok', 'Thumbs up', 'Peace'). By means of a spatial compatibility task, we measured the interfering power of these task-irrelevant stimuli on the behavioral responses of individuals asked to respond to a target. Across three experiments, our results showed that the interactive gestures impact on response selection and reduce spatial compatibility effects as compared to the communicative (non-interactive) gestures. Importantly, this effect was independent of the activation of specific social scripts that may interfere with response selection. Overall, our results show that interactive gestures have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems, possibly because they entail an automatic preparation to respond that involuntary engages the motor system of the observers. We discuss the implications from a developmental and neurophysiological point of view.

Highlights

Gestures are pervasive in our everyday interactions
The reduction of the compatibility effect (CE) for Interactive vs. Communicative gestures occurred for both the dominant and non-dominant hand. These results suggest that, in the Interactive gesture condition, the CE induced by the perceptual salience of the social stimuli might be counter-acted by the call for a complementary response, The findings indicate that this effect is not a mere effect of extensive social motor learning as it occurs both in the dominant and non-dominant hand
To further assess whether the reduction of CE in the Interactive gesture condition might be ascribed to a social affordance effect, we asked participants to respond to the target letter with the index and middle finger of their right hand rather than with their left and right hand [44]

Summary

Introduction

Gestures are pervasive in our everyday interactions. They are used to communicate and disambiguate meanings (deictic gestures like pointing, symbolic gestures, emblems), to clarify or emphasize discourse (gestures accompanying speech, iconic gestures), and to signify actions (pantomimes). Communicative gestures share a common neural substrate with language [1, 2, 3] and constitute precursors of language acquisition, both ontogenetically [4, 5, 6] and phylogenetically [7, 8, 9, 10]. There is a specific subset of gestures that have the function of transmitting socially relevant information from a communicator to a receiver, but are interactive, as they call for a specific response in the observer to complete a joint action. We hypothesize that the key feature of interactive gestures is that they transfer

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