The Importance Of Gestural Communication

Schippers, Gazzola, Goebel, and Keysers (2009) examined how different areas of the brains were activated in romantically involved couples while playing the game of charades. The study used charades to investigate the neural basis of gestural communication by having participants act out and interpret predetermined gestures while their brain activity was being recorded inside of an fMRI machine. Data gathered from the fMRI showed that during production of gestures, the putative motor neuron system (pMNS) composed of the premotor, parietal, and posterior mid-temporal cortices was most significantly recruited. However, during the interpretation condition of the experiment there was significant activation in the both the pMNS and temporo-parietal …show more content…
The authors defended these weaknesses, however, by saying that the lack of counterbalancing was due to the fact that receiving the passive observation trial first would contaminate the data for the participant’s guessing trial because they were watching the same videos for both trials. Even with the inclusion of counterbalancing, the control condition of the study would still be problematic because of the nature of the task being observed. In the study, the participants were told to watch the video of their partner performing the gestures without attempting to guess what actions they were performing. This is problematic, because as we know, our brain processes many things without conscious effort so when the researcher tell the participants no to decipher the actions, there is a fair chance that their brains were doing so subconsciously anyways. If they had wanted to get a better baseline for the subjects’ brain activity they should have had the participants watch a blank screen or some other type of video while they performed the