Ageing, working memory, and mental imagery: Understanding gestural communication in younger and older adults

Give your ideas a hand: the role of iconic hand gestures in enhancing divergent creative thinking

Hand gestures play an integral role in multimodal language and communication. Even though the self-oriented functions of gestures, such as activating a speaker's lexicon and maintaining visuospatial imagery, have been emphasized, gestures' functions in creative thinking are not well-established. In the current study, we investigated the role of iconic gestures in verbal divergent thinking-a creative thinking process related to generating many novel ideas. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that iconic gesture use would facilitate divergent thinking in young adults, especially those with high mental imagery skills. Participants performed Guildford's Alternative Uses Task in a gesture-spontaneous and in a gesture-encouraged condition. We measured fluency (number of ideas), originality (uniqueness of ideas), flexibility (number of idea categories), and elaboration (number of details) in divergent thinking. The results showed that producing iconic gestures in the gesture-encouraged condition positively predicted fluency, originality, and elaboration. In the gesture-spontaneous condition, producing iconic gestures also positively predicted elaboration but negatively predicted flexibility. Mental imagery skills did not interact with the effects of gestures on divergent thinking. These results suggest that iconic gestures are a promising candidate for enhancing almost all aspects of divergent thinking. Overall, the current study adds a new dimension to the self-oriented function of iconic gestures, that is, their contribution to creative thinking.

The analysis of gestural and verbal pragmatic markers produced by Mild Cognitive Impaired participants during longitudinal and autobiographical interviews

CONTEXT

This corpus-based study presents a multimodal analysis of verbal pragmatic markers and non-verbal pragmatic markers in elderly people with Mild Cognitive Impairment aged over 75 years.

METHODS

The corpus collection and analysis methodology has been described in the Belgian CorpAGEst transversal study and the French VintAGE longitudinal and transversal oriented pilot studies. The protocols are available online in both English and French.

RESULTS & CONCLUSION

Our general findings indicate that with ageing, verbal pragmatic markers acquire an interactive function that allows people with MCI to maintain intersubjective relationships with their interlocutor. Furthermore, at the non-verbal level, gestural manifestations are increasingly used over time with a preference for non-verbal pragmatic markers with a referential function and an adaptive function. We aim to show the benefits of linguistic and interactional scientific investigation methods through cognitive impaired ageing for clinicians and family caregivers.

The role of hand gestures in emotion communication: Do type and size of gestures matter?

We communicate emotions in a multimodal way, yet non-verbal emotion communication is a relatively understudied area of research. In three experiments, we investigated the role of gesture characteristics (e.g., type, size in space) on individuals' processing of emotional content. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of emotional narratives from the videoclips either with iconic or beat gestures. Participants in the iconic gesture condition rated the emotional intensity higher than participants in the beat gesture condition. In Experiment 2, the size of gestures and its interaction with gesture type were investigated in a within-subjects design. Participants again rated the emotional intensity of emotional narratives from the videoclips. Although individuals overall rated narrow gestures more emotionally intense than wider gestures, no effects of gesture type, or gesture size and type interaction were found. Experiment 3 was conducted to check whether findings of Experiment 2 were due to viewing gestures in all videoclips. We compared the gesture and no gesture (i.e., speech only) conditions and showed that there was not a difference between them on emotional ratings. However, we could not replicate the findings related to gesture size of Experiment 2. Overall, these findings indicate the importance of examining gesture's role in emotional contexts and that different gesture characteristics such as size of gestures can be considered in nonverbal communication.

The role of gestures in autobiographical memory

Speakers employ co-speech gestures when thinking and speaking; however, gesture's role in autobiographical episodic representations is not known. Based on the gesture-for-conceptualization framework, we propose that gestures, particularly representational ones, support episodic event representations by activating existing episodic elements and causing new ones to be formed in the autobiographical recollections. These gestures may also undertake information-chunking roles to allow for further processing during remembering, such as a sense of recollective experience. Participants (N = 41) verbally narrated three events (a past autobiographical, a future autobiographical, and a non-autobiographical event) and then rated their phenomenological characteristics. We found that, even though gesture use was not different across the three event conditions, representational gestures were positively associated with the episodic event details as well as their recollective quality within the past autobiographical event narratives. These associations were not observed in future event narrations. These findings suggest that gestures are potentially instrumental in the retrieval of details in autobiographical memories.

A cross-sectional study to assess pragmatic strengths and weaknesses in healthy ageing

Background

Ageing refers to the natural and physiological changes that individuals experience over the years. This process also involves modifications in terms of communicative-pragmatics, namely the ability to convey meanings in social contexts and to interact with other people using various expressive means, such as linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic aspects of communication. Very few studies have provided a complete assessment of communicative-pragmatic performance in healthy ageing.

Methods

The aim of this study was to comprehensively assess communicative-pragmatic ability in three samples of 20 (N = 60) healthy adults, each belonging to a different age range (20–40, 65–75, 76–86 years old) and to compare their performance in order to observe any potential changes in their ability to communicate. We also explored the potential role of education and sex on the communicative-pragmatic abilities observed. The three age groups were evaluated with a between-study design by means of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a validated assessment tool characterised by five scales: linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, contextual and conversational.

Results

The results indicated that the pragmatic ability assessed by the ABaCo is poorer in older participants when compared to the younger ones (main effect of age group: F(2,56) = 9.097; p < .001). Specifically, significant differences were detected in tasks on the extralinguistic, paralinguistic and contextual scales. Whereas the data highlighted a significant role of education (F(1,56) = 4.713; p = .034), no sex-related differences were detected.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that the ageing process may also affect communicative-pragmatic ability and a comprehensive assessment of the components of such ability may help to better identify difficulties often experienced by older individuals in their daily life activities.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-022-03304-z.

Aging, Gesture Production, and Disfluency in Speech: A Comparison of Younger and Older Adults

Age-related changes are observed in the speech and gestures of neurotypical individuals. Older adults are more disfluent in speech and use fewer representational gestures (e.g., holding two hands close to each other to mean small), compared to younger adults. Using gestures, especially representational gestures, is common in difficult tasks to aid the conceptualization process and to facilitate lexical access. This study investigates how aging can affect gesture production and the co-occurrence between gesture and speech disfluency. We elicited speech and gesture samples from younger and older adults (N = 60) by using a painting description task that provided concrete and abstract contexts. Results indicated that albeit the two age groups revealed comparable overall speech disfluency and gesture rates, they differed in terms of how their disfluencies and gestures were distributed across specific categories. Moreover, the proportion of speech disfluencies that occur with a gesture was significantly higher for younger than older adults. However, the two age groups were comparable in terms of the proportion of gestures that were accompanied by a speech disfluency. These findings suggest that younger adults' language production system might be better at benefiting from other modalities, that is, gesture, to resolve temporary problems in speech planning. However, from a gesture perspective, it might be difficult to differentiate between gestures' self-oriented and communicative functions and understand their role in speech facilitation. Focusing on specific cases where speech disfluency and gestures co-occur and considering individual differences might bring insight into multimodal communication.

Production and comprehension of co-speech gestures in Parkinson's disease

This study examined how impairments in sensorimotor abilities of individuals with Parkinson's Disease (PD) can be related to the use and understanding of co-speech hand gestures involving literal and figurative actions. We tested individuals with PD (n = 18, 12 males, M_age = 56.5, SD_age = 8.16, PD duration since onset: M = 5.36 years, SD = 3.51, Hoehn and Yahr Scale:M_H&Y = 2.09, SD_H&Y = 0.50) and age- and education-matched neurotypical controls (n = 18, 14 males, M_age = 56.61, SD_age = 8.88) with two experimental tasks. In the gesture production task, participants retold the narratives presented to them in a written format. In the gesture comprehension task, participants were asked to match a gesture with a novel verb in literal and figurative sentence contexts. Results showed that patients with PD gestured significantly less than the neurotypical controls. No group differences were found for the type of gesture use. Individuals with PD performed worse than controls on matching gestures with novel verbs, particularly for figurative meanings. Individuals' severity in the disease negatively correlated with their performance for these figurative novel verb-gesture matches. The performances in the two tasks did not correlate. These findings suggest that problems in sensorimotor abilities resulting from PD can influence overall gesture production and gesture comprehension, providing further evidence on the relations between PD and the impaired use of multimodal language.

Gesture Use and Processing: A Review on Individual Differences in Cognitive Resources

Speakers use spontaneous hand gestures as they speak and think. These gestures serve many functions for speakers who produce them as well as for listeners who observe them. To date, studies in the gesture literature mostly focused on group-comparisons or the external sources of variation to examine when people use, process, and benefit from using and observing gestures. However, there are also internal sources of variation in gesture use and processing. People differ in how frequently they use gestures, how salient their gestures are, for what purposes they produce gestures, and how much they benefit from using and seeing gestures during comprehension and learning depending on their cognitive dispositions. This review addresses how individual differences in different cognitive skills relate to how people employ gestures in production and comprehension across different ages (from infancy through adulthood to healthy aging) from a functionalist perspective. We conclude that speakers and listeners can use gestures as a compensation tool during communication and thinking that interacts with individuals' cognitive dispositions.