Conventionalization, movement and feedback in gesture

Processes of ritualization and conventionalization lie at the core of social coordination. However, the mechanisms and efficacy of such processes are not well understood. Spontaneous gesture/pantomime is an interesting window to these processes because, on the one hand, they come natural to us but, on the other hand, they are not already heavily constrained by cultural/communicative convention. This allows us to observe how conventionalization processes occur in real time in a controlled experimental setting.
Relying on the data produced in "The motivations for conceptual structure in interactive non-verbal event representation" we will look at how the individual “lexical” components evolve through the experimental paradigm due to repeated exposure, use and interactive feedback. Measures from the motion capturing actigraphs will be analyzed and dynamical indices will be correlated with dyads’ accuracy, alignment and amount of spontaneous feedback. We hypothesize that groups with a lot of initial feedback will experience more long-term convergence, gesture reduction and overall higher accuracy.