Identifying the underlying mechanisms of silent gesture production – the delayed gesture depiction task
Creators: name: Yang, Jiahao
name: Kita, Sotaro
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Linguistics
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: The current experiment is a follow-up experiment of the project Identifying the underlying mechanisms of silent gesture production (i.e., the main experiment, https://osf.io/nbzrd). We are collecting the data to ensure participants in the current experiment and the main experiment are sampled from a homogeneous population (1st-year undergraduate students in the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick). The data collected for the current experiment will only be analyzed when the main experiment's result supports the prediction of the simulated action account. The current experiment aims to test the hybrid account that proposes the simulated action account and the communicative signal account representing different stages of an integrated system. The simulated action account describes the early stage of silent gesture production, where action components related to individuals’ embodied experience will be activated more quickly. The communicative account has the upper hand in the later stage, providing the general principle for individuals to select a gesture from potential candidates. Following the hybrid account, if the result of the main experiment supports the simulated action account, one possibility is that the time window (4 seconds) in the time-pressure word depiction task in the main experiment is not sufficient for the communicative signal mechanism to function (i.e., there is not enough time for the participant to complete the communicative value comparison). The current experiment will conduct a delayed gesture depiction task, in which participants would have 4 seconds to plan their gestures for a target word before producing gestures. According to the hybrid account, the communicative signal mechanisms will be activated when participants have sufficient time to initiate and complete the communicative value comparison. Therefore, the hybrid account will have similar predictions to the communicative signal account in the delayed gesture depiction task - individuals will be more likely to produce action-based gestures in the similar shape condition compared to the similar action condition and more likely to produce perception-based gestures in the similar action condition compared to the similar shape condition. Moreover, participants with higher social cognition ability will be more likely to make a correct estimation of the communicative value of gesture, which makes them more likely to produce different gestures when the communicative situation changes The current experiment will adopt the same experimental design and procedure as the main experiment, but with a 4-seconds gesture planning phase before gesture production in each trial. Below is the detailed procedure of the experiment: The current experiment will be conducted asynchronously via a web application (damus.lnx.warwick.ac.uk) developed and maintained by the experimenter. The web application is hosted on a Linux server maintained by the University of Warwick IT team. Participants will be invited via a private link. After giving their informed consent, participants will complete a gesture depiction task with time pressure. In each trial, participants will see a pair of words on the browser for 2000 ms before one of the words is highlighted by a black box. Participants will be asked to read both words. They will then have 4000 ms to plan their gesture for the target word. After the planning phase, the target word will be highlighted by a red box. The participant will be told to start producing gestures when they see the red box. They will have 4 seconds to generate gestures for the target word. Participants will be told that their depictions will be shown to other participants (with their consent), who will have to guess what their gesture means. Participants' gesture depictions will be recorded by the webcam and uploaded to the server. The gesture depiction task will be split into two blocks. In each block, participants will see the 32 target words once, which will be presented either in similar shape condition or similar action condition. For each target word, half of the participants will see similar shape condition first, and the other half will see similar action condition first. The sequence to present the target word will be randomized for each participant. After the gesture depiction task, participants' social cognition ability will be measured by the Empathy Quotient (Baron-Cohen &amp; Wheelwright, 2004), which has been widely used to measure individualsl ability to represent other's mental states (Quesque &amp; Rossetti, 2020). The current experiment's design, sampling, analysis, and variables plan are the same as the main experiment (https://osf.io/nbzrd).