Why do some people gesture more than others when they talk?
People with weaker visual memory, mental rotation and conceptual-planning skills used more meaning-carrying hand gestures, whereas more empathic people used more listener-directed gestures and bigger, higher gestures overall.
Source
Individual differences in frequency and saliency of speech-accompanying gestures: the role of cognitive abilities and empathy
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session individual-differences study: gestures elicited in phrase-definition and social-dilemma tasks were coded and correlated with / regressed on empathy and six cognitive ability scores measured with gesturing prevented
- N
- N=122 · 129 native British English speakers were recruited; 7 were excluded (1 did not understand the tasks, 6 did not finish), leaving 122 analysed
- Population
- Native British English speakers (mean age 19.41 years) from academic senior schools, vocational schools and universities in the West Midlands, UK
- Outcome
- Frequency (per 100 words) of representational, conduit and palm-revealing gestures, and gesture saliency (size and height)
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What they did
The researchers tested 122 young people from schools, vocational colleges and universities so that cognitive abilities would vary widely. Participants defined abstract phrases (such as 'to intervene') and talked through social dilemmas while being filmed, and every gesture was coded as representational (depicting or pointing), conduit (offering an idea on an open palm) or palm-revealing (showing uncertainty), and rated for size and height. Separately, with their hands kept still, participants completed tests of verbal, visual and spatial working memory, mental rotation, conceptual planning and word retrieval, plus an empathy questionnaire. Correlations and multiple regressions linked each predictor to gesture frequency and saliency.
What they found
Participants produced 8,646 gestures, 67% of them representational. Lower visual working memory, slower mental rotation and more errors on the conceptualization task each predicted more frequent representational gestures, and the regression models explained about 22-23% of the variance. Conduit gestures were predicted by poorer visual working memory and conceptualization but also by higher empathy, and empathy predicted more palm-revealing gestures and more salient gestures of all types. Verbal working memory and word-retrieval speed did not predict how often or how saliently anyone gestured.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The design is correlational, so it cannot show that gesturing helps people with weaker spatial skills; the authors stress that only experiments that encourage or prohibit gesturing can test gesture functions. Each ability was measured with a single task, so scores may reflect other abilities too (the 'task impurity' problem), and empathy was a self-report questionnaire rather than a direct measure of caring about clear communication. The elicitation tasks placed little load on verbal memory or word finding, so the null results for those abilities may reflect the tasks rather than a true absence of a link. The sample was young people from urban Britain, and most of the variance in gesturing remained unexplained.
Key terms
- Representational gesture
- A hand movement that depicts an object, action or abstract idea through its shape or motion, or points to a real or imagined location.
- Conduit gesture
- An open palm moving toward the listener as if handing over a formulated idea; it both carries content and manages the interaction.
- Palm-revealing gesture
- Showing an empty palm, often with a shrug, to signal uncertainty or having nothing more to say; purely interactive.
- Gesture saliency
- How noticeable a gesture is, scored here from the body part used (fingers up to whole arm) and how high the hand rises.
- Visuospatial working memory
- The short-term system that holds visual images (visual pattern task) and spatial sequences (Corsi blocks) in mind.
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Quiz yourself
In this study, which pattern linked cognitive ability to representational gestures?
Common questions
Does this mean gesturing makes up for a poor visual memory?
It is consistent with that idea, but the study only shows an association. To show that gestures actually help, researchers need to manipulate gesturing, for example by forbidding it, and see whether performance drops.
Why were participants made to sit on their hands during the cognitive tests?
So the ability scores would not be boosted by gesturing itself; otherwise habitual gesturers might score higher simply because they gestured during testing.
Why did empathy not predict representational gestures?
The authors suggest that for abstract or social topics, depicting gestures may not help adult listeners much, so whether someone produces them may depend mainly on the speaker's own thinking needs rather than concern for the listener.
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