Visible thought the new psychology of body language g beattie mantesh

iconic gestures are presented in isolation from speech, they still convey a great deal of important information.

There is another very important observation in this study. McNeill had always argued that iconic gestures convey meaning in a 'top-down' rather than a 'bottom-up' fashion; that is you have to have some understanding of the overall image portrayed in the hand movement before you can understand what the component actions are representing. McNeill says that the individual parts of iconic gestures only convey meaning 'because of the meaning of the whole'. He says: 'The wiggling fingers mean running only because we know that the gesture as a whole depicts someone running.' But this experiment means that we have to add an important proviso to this statement. We found that an iconic gesture can convey the speed of movement, the direction of movement, and also information about the size of the entity depicted in the gesture, even when people watching the iconic gesture in isolation could not determine exactly what the entity actually was. You only had to know that something was sliding along in a particular direction and at a certain speed to get certain questions correct, but you didn't have to be able to say with any confidence what that something actually was. So iconic gestures may operate in a 'top-down' fashion, but that does not mean that you have to get the full meaning at the highest level before any information is transmitted via the gesture. The meaning of the gesture is still global, with the meaning of the individual parts given their meaning by the meaning of the gesture as a whole, but the process can operate even when there is some ambiguity at the highest level.

One of the most extraordinary results in this experiment emerges when you consider the performance of individual participants. Although all the participants gleaned some additional meaning from the iconic gestures, the percentage increase in accuracy in moving from the speech only to the gesture-speech combinations ranged from 0.9 per cent to 27.6 per cent. In fact the analysis also revealed that the participant with the lowest percentage increase in accuracy in moving from the speech only to the gesture-speech combination was also very poor at obtaining information from the iconic gestures on their own, whereas the participant who showed the highest increase in accuracy going from speech only to gesture-speech combinations was very good at obtaining information from the iconic gestures on their own. There was, in fact, a statistically significant correlation between these two things. In other words those participants who obtained most information about aspects of the original cartoon depicted in the clips in the iconic gestures also tended to get the most additional information when they saw the iconic gestures in addition to hearing the speech. Clearly some people are neglecting this very important channel of iconic gesture in their everyday life and are therefore missing out on a lot of important information that is clearly available, but is not being picked up by them.

Below are the responses of two participants who watched the same iconic gesture but did not hear the corresponding segment of speech. The first participant, who happened to be male, was good at picking up information from iconic gestures generally and obtained an overall accuracy score of 75 per cent for this particular gesture. The second participant, a female, despite trying very hard, did not display much evidence of having obtained significant amounts of information from iconic gestures generally. In this particular case, she obtained an overall accuracy score of 12.5 per cent.

[Bubbles start coming out of her mouth]