Daily Brain Snack: How Gestures Help in Communication
Gestures really do help in communication, helping with prediction and processing of words
You’re a master communication trainer what do you recommend with gestures?
I’m not sure I’m a master, but yes, I have done a lot of communication training over the years.
When it comes to gestures the general advice is: use your body. For multiple reasons. it can reinforce a message, show animation, create a pleasing visual image, and more.
But this research just out has given us another clue as to why gestures might be important.
What is that?
The research by Marlijn ter Bekke and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Germany conducted two experiments on gestures in communication to see the effect of gestures on language processing.
In the first participants watched a computer avatar that said a sentence such as: "How old were you when you learned to … type?,".
Before the key word, in the above example, “type” there was a pause and the avatar did one of three things:
Give a gesture that represented typing
Give a non-specific gesture such as scratching an arm
Do nothing
Participants heard the first part of the sentence, up to the target word, and were then asked how the sentence would likely to continue.
…and obviously with the gesture, predictions were much higher, right?
Yes, pretty obvious, that was precisely what happened. But they then conducted a second experiment and this was without active inference, so no predictions. Participants just listened to the sentence with the gap and then the target word.
But they also had their brain waves measured with EEG (electrodes on the skull).
Oh, and what happened here?
In the gap to the target word they saw brain wave patterns that are associated with anticipation. To be expected but its shows how the brain is responding. What is more interesting is that after the target word there was another brain response, known as an N400 effect. This represents how difficult it was to process the word and with gestures this was significantly reduced showing greater ease in processing.
So gestures help us anticipate but also make the processing of words and or messages easier?
Precisely gestures are not just to fill in, or for the nervous, or for those bad at communication, or Italians. They actively help in communication.
And is this the same in business?
Absolutely I’ve been trying for years to get executives to be more expressive. Sadly there is a tendency to consider too much expressiveness either in facial, bodily, or emotional expression, as negative. This is another pice of research that shows just how important these forms of expressiveness are.
So get using your body when communicating!
Yes (he says nodding).
Reference
Marlijn ter Bekke, Linda Drijvers, Judith Holler.
Co-Speech Hand Gestures Are Used to Predict Upcoming Meaning.
Psychological Science, 2025
DOI: 10.1177/09567976251331041