Department of Psychology.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2014 Feb;143(1):195-204. doi: 10.1037/a0032246. Epub 2013 Apr 8.
Listeners are able to glean information from the gestures that speakers produce, seemingly without conscious awareness. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie this process. Research on human action understanding shows that perceiving another's actions results in automatic activation of the motor system in the observer, which then affects the observer's understanding of the actor's goals. We ask here whether perceiving another's gesture can similarly result in automatic activation of the motor system in the observer. In Experiment 1, we first established a new procedure in which listener response times are used to study how gesture impacts sentence comprehension. In Experiment 2, we used this procedure, in conjunction with a secondary motor task, to investigate whether the listener's motor system is involved in this process. We showed that moving arms and hands (but not legs and feet) interferes with the listener's ability to use information conveyed in a speaker's hand gestures. Our data thus suggest that understanding gesture relies, at least in part, on the listener's own motor system.
听众能够从说话者发出的手势中获取信息，而似乎没有任何有意识的察觉。然而，人们对这一过程背后的机制知之甚少。人类动作理解的研究表明，感知他人的动作会导致观察者的运动系统自动激活，进而影响观察者对行为者目标的理解。我们在这里询问，感知他人的手势是否也会导致观察者的运动系统自动激活。在实验 1 中，我们首先建立了一种新的程序，使用听众的反应时间来研究手势如何影响句子理解。在实验 2 中，我们使用这种程序，结合次要的运动任务，来探究听众的运动系统是否参与了这个过程。我们发现，移动手臂和手（而不是腿和脚）会干扰听众利用说话者手部手势传达的信息的能力。因此，我们的数据表明，理解手势至少部分依赖于听众自己的运动系统。
