A norming study of high-quality video clips of pantomimes, emblems, and meaningless gestures

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the processing of symbolic communicative gestures, such as pantomimes and emblems, but well-controlled stimuli have been scarce. This study describes a dataset of more than 200 video clips of an actress performing pantomimes (gestures that mimic object-directed/object-use actions; e.g., playing guitar), emblems (conventional gestures; e.g., thumbs up), and meaningless gestures. Gestures were divided into four lists. For each of these four lists, 50 Italian and 50 American raters judged the meaningfulness of the gestures and provided names and descriptions for them. The results of these rating and norming measures are reported separately for the Italian and American raters, offering the first normed set of meaningful and meaningless gestures for experimental studies. The stimuli are available for download via the Figshare database.

Keywords: Emblems; Gestures; Object-directed actions; Pantomimes.

Fig. 1

Example stimuli. Still frames from video clips showing pantomimes (i.e., object-directed actions; e.g., putting on a ring), emblems (i.e., conventional communicative gestures; e.g., thumbs up), and meaningless gestures (i.e., gestures that do not carry any meaning; e.g., ND_35). Each video clip lasted 2.5 s

Fig. 2

(a) Proportions of pantomimes rated as meaningful. Depending on the agreement between the intended meaning of the gesture and the expressed meaning reported in the naming task, the meaningful pantomimes were divided into those given the correct meaning (black), disagreements (gray), different meanings (red), or meaningless gestures (blue) by the Italian and American groups of raters. The horizontal dotted line indicates the proportion of pantomimes that the two groups consistently rated as meaningful and gave their correct meaning. (b) Proportions of emblems rated as meaningful. Depending on the agreement between the intended meaning and the expressed meaning that participants reported in the naming task, these were split into those given the correct meaning (black), disagreements (gray), different meanings (red), or meaningless gestures (blue) by the Italian and American groups of raters. The horizontal dotted line indicates the proportion of emblems that the two groups consistently rated to be meaningful and gave their correct meaning. (c) Proportions of meaningless gestures rated as meaningless by the Italian and American groups of raters. The horizontal dotted line indicates the proportion of gestures that were consistently rated as meaningless in the two groups