Search results for "gesture"
showing 10 items of 186 documents
The EEG and fMRI signatures of neural integration: An investigation of meaningful gestures and corresponding speech
2015
Abstract One of the key features of human interpersonal communication is our ability to integrate information communicated by speech and accompanying gestures. However, it is still not fully understood how this essential combinatory process is represented in the human brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have unanimously attested the relevance of activation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus (pSTS/MTG), while electroencephalography (EEG) studies have shown oscillatory activity in specific frequency bands to be associated with multisensory integration. In the current study, we used fMRI and EEG to separately investigate the anatomical and o…
Path Following in Non-Visual Conditions.
2018
Path-following tasks have been investigated mostly under visual conditions, that is when subjects are able to see both the path and the tool, or limb, used for navigation. Moreover, only basic path shapes are usually adopted. In the present experiment, participants must rely exclusively on continuous, non-speech, and ecological auditory and vibrotactile cues to follow a path on a flat surface. Two different, asymmetric path shapes were tested. Participants navigated by moving their index finger over a surface sensing position and force. Results show that the different non-visual feedback modes did not affect the task's accuracy, yet they affected its speed, with vibrotactile feedback causin…
The facilitative effect of gestures on the neural processing of semantic complexity in a continuous narrative
2019
© 2019 Elsevier Inc. Gestures are elemental components of social communication and aid comprehension of verbal messages; however, little is known about the potential role of gestures in facilitating processing of semantic complexity in an ecologically valid setting. The goal of this study was to investigate whether cognitive load, as indexed by semantic complexity, is modulated by the presentation of gestures accompanying speech. Twenty healthy participants watched 16 video clips of a short narrative while instructed to carefully listen to and watch the narrator while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired. The videos contained passages with and without various co-s…
Neural dynamics of learning sound-action associations.
2008
A motor component is pre-requisite to any communicative act as one must inherently move to communicate. To learn to make a communicative act, the brain must be able to dynamically associate arbitrary percepts to the neural substrate underlying the pre-requisite motor activity. We aimed to investigate whether brain regions involved in complex gestures (ventral pre-motor cortex, Brodmann Area 44) were involved in mediating association between novel abstract auditory stimuli and novel gestural movements. In a functional resonance imaging (fMRI) study we asked participants to learn associations between previously unrelated novel sounds and meaningless gestures inside the scanner. We use functio…
Evidence for gesture-speech mismatch detection impairments in schizophrenia.
2019
Patients with schizophrenia suffer from impairments in the perception and production of gestures. The extent to which patients can access the semantic association between speech and co-verbal gestures in concrete or abstract/metaphorical meaning contexts is unknown. We investigated 1) how patients differ from controls in gesture matching performance, 2) how performance differs in the context of abstract versus concrete meaning, and 3) whether formal thought disorder (FTD) symptom severity predicts task impairment. Forty-five patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (two subgroups, mild and severe) took part in this study. Participants were presented with video clips, each showing an a…
How Does It Feel to Be a Woman Victim of Sexual Harassment? The Effect of 360°-Video-Based Virtual Reality on Empathy and Related Variables.
2021
Sexual harassment (SH) occurs when people-mostly women-are targets of unwanted sexual comments, gestures, or actions associated with a lack of empathy on the part of the offender. Virtual Reality (VR) has been defined as the "ultimate empathy machine" because it allows the user to take other people's perspective. The present work aims to study the effect of a 360°-video-based VR experience (vs. traditional perspective-taking task) on empathy and related concepts (i.e., violent attitude, perspective taking, sense of oneness) toward a female victim of SH in a male sample. A within-subjects design was used with 44 men who experienced both conditions (360° and narrative). Results showed the sup…
Implicit visual analysis in handedness recognition.
1998
In the present study, we addressed the problem of whether hand representations, derived from the control of hand gesture, are used in handedness recognition. Pictures of hands and fingers, assuming either common or uncommon postures, were presented to right-handed subjects, who were required to judge their handedness. In agreement with previous results (Parsons, 1987, 1994; Gentilucci, Daprati, & Gangitano, 1998), subjects recognized handedness through mental movement of their own hand in order to match the posture of the presented hand. This was proved by a control experiment of physical matching. The new finding was that presentation of common finger postures affected responses differ…
Gesture's body orientation modulates the N400 for visual sentences primed by gestures
2020
Abstract Body orientation of gesture entails social‐communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face‐to‐face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment presenting to participants (n = 21) videos of frontal and lateral communicative hand gestures of 5 s (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented …
The foot posture index in men practicing three sports different in their biomechanical gestures.
2014
BackgroundThe technical gestures characteristic of certain sports may lead to one type of foot being more prevalent than the others. The Foot Posture Index (FPI) has been used as a diagnostic tool for support postures in various sports, but the differences in these postures between sports of distinct gestures in their actions are far from completely understood.MethodsThe overall FPI, obtained as the sum of the scores of its six individual criteria, was determined in 90 male athletes (30 runners, 30 basketball players, and 30 handball players) in static bipedal stance and relaxed position. Analysis of variance was used to find significant differences among the three sports in the total FPI a…
The differing roles of the frontal cortex in fluency tests
2012
Fluency tasks have been widely used to tap the voluntary generation of responses. The anatomical correlates of fluency tasks and their sensitivity and specificity have been hotly debated. However, investigation of the cognitive processes involved in voluntary generation of responses and whether generation is supported by a common, general process (e.g. fluid intelligence) or specific cognitive processes underpinned by particular frontal regions has rarely been addressed. This study investigates a range of verbal and non-verbal fluency tasks in patients with unselected focal frontal ( n = 47) and posterior ( n = 20) lesions. Patients and controls ( n = 35) matched for education, age and s…