Movements of significance, Dr. Wim Pouw – talk invitation

On next Thursday, our guest will be Dr. Wim Pouw from Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour.

Guest: Dr Wim Pouw

Date: Thursday 2.03.2023, 3:30 pm (Warsaw time)

Abstract:

Manual gestures are communicative bodily postures in motion which signify in coordination with speech. Gestures have primarily gathered attention from cognitive psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists, who are united under the umbrella of ‘gesture studies’. Gestures studies tend to look through gesture, inferring their significance through meticulous interpretation, where whole worlds have been envisaged about what significance lies behind the movements: e.g., Gestures are held to reflect an inner world of sensorimotor simulations; Gestures are schematizations of thought; Gestures are primordial symbols. Such views have emancipated gestures, as unique windows into the human mind. We are, it turns out, not merely moving about.

In this talk I will however stop for a moment to peer through gesture, and appreciate gesture qua movement. What do we see? We see that there is pulse-quality of gesture producing forces through acceleration, thereby physically and functionally perturbing speech processes; grounding gesture’s phylogeny, ontogeny, and cognition, in physiology. I also discuss recent research with Siamang apes (Symphalangus Syndactylus) which will support the argument that there is cross-species continuity in how bodies are physically used for expression. I conclude therefore that expressive bodies are, it turns out, just moving about, but in more significant ways than previously thought.

Bio:

Dr. Pouw is a cognitive scientist at the Radboud University Nijmegen studying spoken language and its coordination between manual- and other bodily gestures and movements (e.g., respiration, head movements). His overall research program is about understanding how these multiple bodily systems can come to coordinate (e.g., synchronize) in a way that allows for novel or more stable communicative behavior to emerge. You can read more about his research here: wimpouw.com.

Pouw, W. & Fuchs, S. (2022). Origins of vocal-entangled gesture. [ScienceDirect]

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This seminar is a part of Traincrease lecture series. This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952324.