Are depictive gestures like pictures? Commonalities and differences in semantic processing

Conversation is multi-modal, involving both talk and gesture. Does understanding depictive gestures engage processes similar to those recruited in the comprehension of drawings or photographs? Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from neurotypical adults as they viewed spontaneously produced depictive gestures preceded by congruent and incongruent contexts. Gestures were presented either dynamically in short, soundless video-clips, or statically as freeze frames extracted from gesture videos. In a separate ERP experiment, the same participants viewed related or unrelated pairs of photographs depicting common real-world objects. Both object photos and gesture stimuli elicited less negative ERPs from 400 to 600 ms post-stimulus when preceded by matching versus mismatching contexts (dN450). Object photos and static gesture stills also elicited less negative ERPs between 300 and 400 ms post-stimulus (dN300). Findings demonstrate commonalities between the conceptual integration processes underlying the interpretation of iconic gestures and other types of image-based representations of the visual world.

► We compared neuro-cognitive processes engaged by pictures and depictive gestures.
► Prime-target trial types: photo-photo, cartoon-gesture video, cartoon-gesture jpeg.
► Targets were congruent or incongruent with context primes.
► ERPs time-locked to all three target types exhibit N400 congruency effect.
► ERPs to photos and gesture freeze frames exhibit N300 congruency effect as well.