Speaker 1: Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we're back with part two of our talk about the
Speaker 1: pointing gesture in humans, maybe in animals, mostly in humans. Robert,
Speaker 1: I have a question, Yes, since we recorded part one,
Speaker 1: have you noticed yourself noticing the way you point at
Speaker 1: things and the way your family points at things? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe a little bit. Actually, you know, we
Speaker 1: for one thing, I guess around the house, there's not
Speaker 1: a lot. I mean, what am I going to point out? Right?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's all a very established environment. We've
Speaker 1: got a few walks here and there and done, you know,
Speaker 1: some stuff outside. But I don't know, I haven't done
Speaker 1: much specific pointing. Um maybe a little bit at like
Speaker 1: birds and squirrels and all. But um, yeah, I I
Speaker 1: found that. I want to say that this these episodes
Speaker 1: really changed the way I engage in pointing, but it
Speaker 1: I don't think it has. It's really made me. The
Speaker 1: area where it has influenced me more is mode noticing
Speaker 1: how much we depend on the idea of pointing in
Speaker 1: our language, and in just our our understanding of the world,
Speaker 1: and in our technology, which I'll get to at the
Speaker 1: end of this episode. But you wanted to talk some
Speaker 1: more about animals, right, you didn't get enough animal pointing
Speaker 1: in the last episode. Oh yeah, yeah, we we closed
Speaker 1: out the last episode. And if you did not listen
Speaker 1: to the last episode, do go back and listen to it,
Speaker 1: because this is definitely a part one and part two
Speaker 1: situation here and not just you know, to treatments on
Speaker 1: a similar topic. So yeah, at the end, we were
Speaker 1: talking a little bit about dogs and about um elephants
Speaker 1: and dolphins. I wanted to point out that cats and
Speaker 1: horses have also been attributed some degree of understanding of
Speaker 1: human pointing, at least in some studies. Um Uh, horses,
Speaker 1: I can, I guess I can understand that one a bit.
Speaker 1: With cats, I'm I'm very much on the fence with that.
Speaker 1: I'm a little doubtful, but allegedly at least some cats
Speaker 1: are able to pick up on that. Um. Now, on
Speaker 1: the divide between a domestic dog's ability to understand pointing
Speaker 1: versus a wild wolf's inability to understand pointing, I ran across, uh,
Speaker 1: some some writings about this from primatologists Friends of All,
Speaker 1: who has been a past guest on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We we interviewed him one time a long time ago.
Speaker 1: I think actually Christian and I interviewed him about his
Speaker 1: book called Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart
Speaker 1: Animals Are? In this very book, are we smart enough
Speaker 1: to Know How smart animals are? Um? Uh? Friends of
Speaker 1: All says the following about this domestic dog and wolf
Speaker 1: divide quote. Wolves may be poor at following human pointing,
Speaker 1: but when it comes to picking up hints from their
Speaker 1: own kind, they beat dogs. The investigators ascribed this con
Speaker 1: trust to attention rather than cognition. They point out that
Speaker 1: wolves watch one another more closely, as they rely on
Speaker 1: the pack for survival, whereas dogs rely on us. That
Speaker 1: I think is an excellent point. I mean, so some
Speaker 1: people I think have tried to say, like, oh, if
Speaker 1: an animal doesn't understand human pointing gestures, that's like a
Speaker 1: cognitive limitation of the animals because the animals not smart
Speaker 1: enough to get what's going on, which I think is ridiculous,
Speaker 1: Like it doesn't take the ethological point of view into
Speaker 1: consideration that animals are adapted to certain kinds of social interactions.
Speaker 1: It's not like that that an animal is not smart
Speaker 1: if it's not particularly adapted to human gestures. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah. His main point here is that, you know,
Speaker 1: we have to be very careful about human centric criteria
Speaker 1: in our understanding and evaluation of animal intelligence. The dog
Speaker 1: only seems brighter to some because it is so closely
Speaker 1: aligned with our own cognition again via you know, these
Speaker 1: thousands of years ers of cohabitation and domestication. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think even this came up in the last episode.
Speaker 1: There might even be some evidence to indicate that it's
Speaker 1: not even all they're just in like the dog's inbred instinct.
Speaker 1: A lot of it might be literally just exposure to
Speaker 1: humans within the dog's own lifetime. And and it's interesting
Speaker 1: too if if we think again to what pointing essentially
Speaker 1: is for the human animal, like really boil it down
Speaker 1: a means of directing the attention of others to something,
Speaker 1: then it's not It's not like there are not other
Speaker 1: examples in the wild gaze, body language and vocalization instantly
Speaker 1: come to mind. Multiple species on say the African savannah
Speaker 1: or within a rainforest community, they communicate and or pick
Speaker 1: up on queues that direct attention towards, say, a common adversary,
Speaker 1: some sort of a predator creeping into the area. An
Speaker 1: animal alarm signal is simply an anti predator adaptation. And likewise,
Speaker 1: especially with some birds, there are also deceptive alarm call
Speaker 1: is that manipulate these systems. So you know, we have
Speaker 1: to consider that. We also have to consider alarm pheromones
Speaker 1: chemical signals that achieve the same ends. And that's something
Speaker 1: we we don't only see that in animals. We see
Speaker 1: examples of this in plants. Now that's very interesting, and
Speaker 1: I wonder, I don't know, I don't know the answer
Speaker 1: to this. I wonder if you do, if there's any
Speaker 1: evidence of pheromonal signaling signaling having directionality to it. So
Speaker 1: not just saying like, hey, there is something to be
Speaker 1: concerned about, but hey, there's something right here to be
Speaker 1: concerned about. Here's where it is. This would be this
Speaker 1: would be a fun one to get into. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about doing a plant communication and even
Speaker 1: planned intelligence episode for a while. I think that's something
Speaker 1: we should get to this year for sure, totally. Now,
Speaker 1: other other examples from the animal world reveal just how
Speaker 1: unnecessary the question is with certain species, uh, consider ants
Speaker 1: for example, which as you social insects, they're capable of
Speaker 1: working together to perform complex tasks and and solve rather
Speaker 1: interesting problems. We've we've talked about this in the show before,
Speaker 1: but despite the trappings of our language, when we consider
Speaker 1: a queen in an in an ant colony, there is
Speaker 1: no single ant commanding the others, there's no ant pointing,
Speaker 1: and yet there is this communication based on pheromones, sounds,
Speaker 1: and touch. That's a very good point, I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think we can naively fall into the assumption, yeah,
Speaker 1: that the queen is in charge of the ant colony,
Speaker 1: but in fact, there is something in charge of the
Speaker 1: ant colony. But it's not a single individual animal. It's
Speaker 1: a distributed kind of intelligence and directionality. It's almost like
Speaker 1: the way that a government might be directed by a constitution,
Speaker 1: but the constitution is in the ants genes. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: like when we compare the human condition to the ant condition,
Speaker 1: you know, there's just a lot of stuff that is
Speaker 1: there's not going to be a really a good one
Speaker 1: to one comparison. Though, of course we we end up
Speaker 1: falling back on that, right because a lot of that
Speaker 1: is how we innately understand the world without the inside
Speaker 1: of science, Like how do we understand the ant? We
Speaker 1: try and put ourselves in the mind of the ant,
Speaker 1: within the culture of the ant, and we're going to
Speaker 1: use our own model to judge that by our kind
Speaker 1: of hierarchies, like who's your boss? But the queen is
Speaker 1: not the ant's boss, really, the queen is more like
Speaker 1: the ants. Uh sex organs. Yeah, it's like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: considering the sex organs to be the leader of the
Speaker 1: human organism. So anyway, those are just some additional thoughts
Speaker 1: on the the animal realm of pointing and not pointing.
Speaker 1: But most of what we're gonna be talking about in
Speaker 1: this part two is going to relate back to the
Speaker 1: the human condition of pointing at things and what does
Speaker 1: it mean and how it factors into our larger cognitive picture.
Speaker 1: Right now, one of the things we talked about in
Speaker 1: the last episode is the idea of pointing as a
Speaker 1: as a pretty much universal human communication property is found
Speaker 1: in all cultures that arise is very naturally, very young
Speaker 1: in children all over the place, basically, with the only
Speaker 1: major known variations being like certain neurological conditions. But so
Speaker 1: here's an interesting question is, so, if pointing seems to
Speaker 1: arise naturally in children, uh, you know, there are obviously
Speaker 1: cultural variations around conventions for pointing and adults. It looks
Speaker 1: like children pretty much everywhere start pointing roughly around the
Speaker 1: same stage and development. Yeah. I think some people say
Speaker 1: what around by by age one? And I think it's
Speaker 1: also been said about nine to fourteen months, so basically
Speaker 1: that window, that's right, Yeah, exactly. So it seems like
Speaker 1: this absolutely crucial piece of early communication. And some theorists
Speaker 1: have argued that pointing is the first exclusively informative gesture
Speaker 1: that most children display. It's like the child's first type
Speaker 1: of pure information communication. But the interesting question is how
Speaker 1: does that happen? How does pointing again in the child?
Speaker 1: Where does it come from? And how do we learn
Speaker 1: to do it? So I want to refer to a
Speaker 1: study that I was reading by Catholo Madigan, Gregor Cotchell,
Speaker 1: and Brent Strickland, published in the journal Science Advances in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen called the Origin of Pointing Evidence for the
Speaker 1: touch hypothesis. Uh So, so it's asking this question, where
Speaker 1: does pointing come from in development? What developmental process leads
Speaker 1: to the pointing gesture. So the authors here claim that
Speaker 1: because pointing is so foundational in social communication, quote, determining
Speaker 1: the origin of pointing is therefore essential to our understanding
Speaker 1: of human language and uniqueness. And yet up to now
Speaker 1: we have known next to nothing about where it comes from.
Speaker 1: Now this doesn't mean nobody has ever thought about the
Speaker 1: issue before this study. There have been a number of
Speaker 1: hypotheses that researchers have put out there, uh about you know,
Speaker 1: good guesses about where pointing might come from and what
Speaker 1: kinds of process is an infancy lead to it? And
Speaker 1: one of the main ones has been the idea of
Speaker 1: the reaching hypothesis. So this hypothesis goes like this, Um,
Speaker 1: what if pointing grows naturally out of a child's reaching
Speaker 1: for objects they want. So, imagine a child reaching out
Speaker 1: for something. You know, Uh, the child wants a cookie.
Speaker 1: She wants to reach her hand out and grasp it,
Speaker 1: but it is beyond an arm's length, and then so
Speaker 1: she's reaching out for it, she can't reach it. But then,
Speaker 1: of course the god's interfere a parent steps in and
Speaker 1: gives her the things she wants, hands the cookie to her. Now, children,
Speaker 1: it's hypothesized that over time you know, kind of like
Speaker 1: a rat in a skinner box, a child will ritualize
Speaker 1: themselves to reach a handout toward a desired object through
Speaker 1: operant conditioning. So you know, the way operant conditioning would
Speaker 1: work in a skinner box or any kind of lab
Speaker 1: experiment is that like a mouse doesn't need to know
Speaker 1: why pressing a button gets it a food pellet, it
Speaker 1: just does. And likewise, a child doesn't need to understand
Speaker 1: at first why reaching toward an object far away often
Speaker 1: ends up with that object in their hands. It just
Speaker 1: works through operant conditioning, and the conditioning takes hold and
Speaker 1: encourages the behavior. But the authors here note that there
Speaker 1: there are several reasons this hypothesis is probably not correct
Speaker 1: for pointing uh or at least this version of the
Speaker 1: hypothesis uh it at least fails to account for the
Speaker 1: major type of pointing in question. So remember the difference
Speaker 1: we talked about in the last episode. I think parents
Speaker 1: will probably be familiar with this, the difference between imperative
Speaker 1: pointing and declarative pointing. Remember, imperative is the kind of
Speaker 1: pointing of I want that is usually done with an
Speaker 1: open hand, and it's to get an object that would
Speaker 1: be kind of like what we're just talking about with
Speaker 1: reaching for something you want versus a very different kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Declarative pointing also known as informative pointing, which
Speaker 1: is look at that. It's the the explicit attempt to
Speaker 1: direct someone's attention to an object, rather than, you know,
Speaker 1: a request to get the object into your hand. And
Speaker 1: there's plenty of evidence that these two types of pointing
Speaker 1: are acquired at different stages of development. Not surprisingly, imperative
Speaker 1: pointing comes first, and the authors here say that the
Speaker 1: reaching hypothesis might account for imperative pointing, but not for
Speaker 1: what they call a declarative or what they call informative pointing. Quote.
Speaker 1: Since children use imperative points to have things handed to
Speaker 1: them rather than simply to direct attention, imperative points are
Speaker 1: produced with an open hand rather than a single index finger,
Speaker 1: and they feature significantly less vocalizations and joint attention than
Speaker 1: prototypical pointing gestures. Uh and I thought that was interesting too,
Speaker 1: like that. Uh that Apparently having like the look at
Speaker 1: that type pointing, the informative pointing is tends to be
Speaker 1: accompanied more by vocal as a aations about what you're
Speaker 1: pointing at. Which I would have expected kind of the opposite.
Speaker 1: I would have expected more noises to be made during
Speaker 1: the like give me that reaching I guess, I guess
Speaker 1: they give me that reaching is. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: more direct, right, it's like that me want you know,
Speaker 1: like bring that to me, that to me, um, put
Speaker 1: that in my mouth kind of a thing. Whereas if
Speaker 1: you're gesturing to a bird, it's like, what about that bird?
Speaker 1: What am I looking for? What is my you know,
Speaker 1: how are we relating to this? You're saying we should
Speaker 1: try and catch it? We should just stare at it?
Speaker 1: Is it? Is it? Something good about it? Something bad
Speaker 1: about it? Something it's doing something, you know, intrinsic to
Speaker 1: just what it is. You know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of additional questions that arise. Yeah, that's right. The pointing
Speaker 1: gesture is is far more ambiguous and and could go
Speaker 1: in a lot more directions. The imperative pointing is much simpler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're right. Imperative gesture towards say a cupcake,
Speaker 1: there it is. There's no question what is desired there, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the color of the frosting,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, how often does that happen. So yeah,
Speaker 1: in the case of the study, we're more curious about
Speaker 1: where the later kind of pointing comes from. The informative
Speaker 1: or declarative. Look at that pointing usually with the index
Speaker 1: finger instead of the whole hand outstretched. Um So, the
Speaker 1: next hypothesis that they talk about is the imitation hypothesis.
Speaker 1: This one is pretty common sensical. The idea is that
Speaker 1: pointing originates in children imitating the pointing that their parents do.
Speaker 1: So you see parents pointing and then children start doing
Speaker 1: the same thing. That makes sense. I mean, we assume
Speaker 1: that children learn language by listening to parents and other
Speaker 1: adults talk, and they pick it up that way, So
Speaker 1: why not learn this type of communication by imitating their parents.
Speaker 1: It's very common sensical. But the evidence we have indicates
Speaker 1: that this is pretty much totally wrong for declarative pointing.
Speaker 1: Um So, if children pointed by imitation of their parents,
Speaker 1: for one thing, you would expect to see more cross
Speaker 1: cultural variation in how children pick up pointing. An anthropologists
Speaker 1: do not see this cross cultural variation and how how
Speaker 1: children pick up pointing. There are like sort of pointing
Speaker 1: cultures and different conventions of pointing among adults in different cultures,
Speaker 1: but there doesn't seem to be a lot of variation
Speaker 1: about how pointing starts to happen in young children. That
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I guess part of it
Speaker 1: comes it's one of these things with childhood development, like
Speaker 1: has it you'd have to carry out like a pointing
Speaker 1: free child rearing process as an experiment, And how would
Speaker 1: you even begin to do that, How would you have
Speaker 1: the commitment to do that? Yeah, totally. Now you can
Speaker 1: look at it the other way, And actually, I will
Speaker 1: look at a study like this in a second. Not
Speaker 1: so not someone trying to create a pointing free environment
Speaker 1: for a child, but trying to train a child with
Speaker 1: lots of exposure to pointing to see what that does. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll look at that in just a second. But first,
Speaker 1: just to to quote the authors of the study we're
Speaker 1: talking about, uh, you know, first of all, they say,
Speaker 1: the more morphology of early childhood pointing seems pretty much universal.
Speaker 1: It's like the extended index finger point with they say,
Speaker 1: with infants in all cultures pointing pretty much the same
Speaker 1: way and around the same time and development. So this
Speaker 1: really makes it seem like it's not based on uh,
Speaker 1: imitating little variations in how adults in your culture point.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, they say, you know, if kids pick
Speaker 1: up informative pointing by mimicking their parents in naturalistic contexts,
Speaker 1: you might expect that deliberate attempts to expose young children
Speaker 1: to lots of pointing gestures would accelerate their adoption of pointing.
Speaker 1: Right that, like that, they would start to point more
Speaker 1: and earlier if the adults around them do a whole
Speaker 1: lot of pointing to train them. And does this happen? Well,
Speaker 1: this is what I was just talking about. A study
Speaker 1: from twelve actually looked into this. It was by Daniel Matthews,
Speaker 1: Tanya Baine, Elena Levin, and Michael Tomasello in Developmental Science
Speaker 1: from and this that he had mothers performed daily training
Speaker 1: with pointing fur their infants, and these would be infants
Speaker 1: of nine, ten or eleven months of age. And then
Speaker 1: this was compared with a control group of infants of
Speaker 1: the same ages who got daily musical training for the
Speaker 1: same amount of time. And the researchers here found that
Speaker 1: quote infants ability to point with the index finger at
Speaker 1: the end of the study was not affected by the training,
Speaker 1: but was instead predicted by infants prior ability to follow
Speaker 1: the gaze direction of an adult. And they say that
Speaker 1: quote this suggests that prior social cognitive advances, rather than
Speaker 1: adults socialization of pointing per se, determine the developmental onset
Speaker 1: of indexical pointing. So there are some variations in in
Speaker 1: the adoption of pointing, but it seems like one of
Speaker 1: the main factors informing that is something about like how
Speaker 1: well a child follows where an adult is looking naturally
Speaker 1: and things like that, that not how much pointing they
Speaker 1: see happening around them. Okay, so anyway, that makes it
Speaker 1: look like the imitation of adult pointing is probably not
Speaker 1: the best or main explanation for what's going on with
Speaker 1: the uh with with children picking up pointing gestures on
Speaker 1: their own. So what else could explain it? Well, the
Speaker 1: authors here they present an alternative hypothesis. They say that
Speaker 1: declarative or informative pointing originates in the desire to touch things. Well,
Speaker 1: it is true that children do love to touch things.
Speaker 1: A lot of energy has to go into reminding them
Speaker 1: not to touch things. You take them to an art museum,
Speaker 1: you take them, uh or even to you know today,
Speaker 1: with a lot of I'm sure a number of parents
Speaker 1: are encountering. This is where having to do more and
Speaker 1: more uh teles schooling, more and more screen time to
Speaker 1: help them, you know, hang out with friends and and
Speaker 1: actually get their education. Sometimes they're using their their parents
Speaker 1: computers and we have to remind them, oh, you don't
Speaker 1: actually have to touch the screen. It's not a touch screen.
Speaker 1: And also and and you could actually hurt the screen
Speaker 1: by tapping on it like this. Uh So, yeah, kids
Speaker 1: are very tactile for sure, Yes, totally. I mean, and
Speaker 1: the authors here talk about this. They talk about the
Speaker 1: it's a it's especially common in young children to want
Speaker 1: to not just sample something by one sense at a time,
Speaker 1: but to have multiple coordinated sensory experiences of an object. So, uh,
Speaker 1: one of the main ones is to coordinate visual and
Speaker 1: haptic information gathering. You want to look at and touch something,
Speaker 1: and so like the idea of an art museum where
Speaker 1: you can't touch the paintings is naturally counterintuitive to young children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean in a sense, you know, they're they're in
Speaker 1: kind of a different sense realm, you know. There you
Speaker 1: have to think of them as kind of like little
Speaker 1: alien probes that have landed on another world and they
Speaker 1: need to collect all of this data. So while you know,
Speaker 1: you and I we can go to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: an art museum or a museum full of like ancient artifacts,
Speaker 1: and we're totally fine not touching everything. We we have
Speaker 1: a general idea what it would feel if we did,
Speaker 1: but you do not necessarily the case with the child
Speaker 1: and uh. And it is wonderful to see so many
Speaker 1: museums these days, uh incorporating some sort of touch exhibit
Speaker 1: for the younger children so as to you know, understanding
Speaker 1: that they must touch something. So here, here is something
Speaker 1: you can touch to get a literally get a feel
Speaker 1: for it. Well, I don't know, maybe I'm about to
Speaker 1: reveal something about my own infantile mentality, but I, uh,
Speaker 1: I actively have to resist to the desire to touch
Speaker 1: when I go into museums and I'm looking at sculptures
Speaker 1: and stuff. I don't know if other adults are like
Speaker 1: this and they just don't talk about it. Uh, maybe
Speaker 1: this reveals something about me. But like when I, you know,
Speaker 1: I was recently last year, I was at the Louver
Speaker 1: and I wanted to touch the sculptures. I had to
Speaker 1: like keep reminding myself, like, you can't touch that huh. Now,
Speaker 1: I wonder I wonder where it comes from though, and
Speaker 1: you specifically, because on one hand, there is this what
Speaker 1: we were talking about here, the childlike desire to touch uh,
Speaker 1: just the human need for sensory information about something. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, I wonder if it is tied
Speaker 1: at all to uh, something that Christian I did an
Speaker 1: episode about years ago, the call of the void, you know,
Speaker 1: the desire to do the thing that is prohibited, such
Speaker 1: as touch the mona Lisa or or what have you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean I also do experience that sometimes,
Speaker 1: like just like a taboo is presented and you have
Speaker 1: that instinct to violated automatically, which you have to resist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit of both, who knows. I will
Speaker 1: say that I feel like my intuitive desire to touch
Speaker 1: things tends to be correlated to um to how ancient
Speaker 1: and mysterious they are. Yeah. Yeah, I I could definitely
Speaker 1: can definitely get that. When you see like a you know,
Speaker 1: a piece of art that is thousands of years old,
Speaker 1: there is a there is this this feeling that you
Speaker 1: know you do want to touch it. There is a
Speaker 1: desire to engage with it physically by confessing all this,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to give you other adults out there
Speaker 1: license to go in museums and touch things. Don't touch
Speaker 1: the sculptures, folks. Human remains are another one. I think
Speaker 1: when when there are actual human remains in a in
Speaker 1: some sort of an exhibit, there is this sort of
Speaker 1: you know, maybe slightly ghoulish, you know, feeling like you
Speaker 1: want to touch this thing that was once a part
Speaker 1: of a living being. You know, yeah, totally, I want
Speaker 1: to touch the mummy. It's true. I mean, though, I
Speaker 1: think that kind of thing makes a lot more sense
Speaker 1: for children because when you're when you're a young child,
Speaker 1: you're not just I mean, when when you're a young child,
Speaker 1: coordinating visual and haptic feedback is actually informative. You are
Speaker 1: learning things from that that I think an adult touching
Speaker 1: a mummy is probably not really learning. When you're a child,
Speaker 1: you're still trying to coordinate your your relationships of what
Speaker 1: things look like versus what they feel like, and as
Speaker 1: an adult you don't need to do that as much anymore.
Speaker 1: So it's probably less excuse for me. So before anyway,
Speaker 1: but back to the STU. Before the experiment, the authors
Speaker 1: think that there was already a bit of good reason
Speaker 1: for thinking that pointing begins with the touch instinct, and
Speaker 1: they give some examples based on previous research. For example,
Speaker 1: I thought this was pretty interesting. They say, quote, children
Speaker 1: use a prototypical pointing hand shape to explore objects, tactually
Speaker 1: from as early as six months, and as the frequency
Speaker 1: of pointing gestures increases from around nine months of age,
Speaker 1: the frequency of this kind of exploratory touch decreases, suggesting
Speaker 1: that pointing is somehow taking over from touch. Oh you know,
Speaker 1: I have to return to the museum for a second here, Joe,
Speaker 1: because have you ever had this situation? Hopefully you and
Speaker 1: and listeners out there, hopefully none of you have had
Speaker 1: this direct experience yourself, But I've seen this happen to
Speaker 1: other people where you'll have a section of the museum,
Speaker 1: you have a lot of security there, and someone is
Speaker 1: pointing at the artwork and they're reprimanded for it. Uh huh, yes,
Speaker 1: like the point too close. Yeah, And I wonder if
Speaker 1: part of that is, like again comes down to the
Speaker 1: idea that you know, what a what is the line
Speaker 1: between pointing at something and touching it or touching it accidentally?
Speaker 1: But then also perhaps it gets down to a deeper
Speaker 1: connection between pointing and touching. I think that could be
Speaker 1: exactly right. I mean, so like it appears there's this
Speaker 1: correlation as the as the exploratory touching of objects decreases,
Speaker 1: the pointing instinct increases, almost as if you're trading one
Speaker 1: for the other. That that's very interesting to me. There
Speaker 1: there could be a lot of a lot of information
Speaker 1: in that little nugget. I think we should keep that
Speaker 1: in mind as we go forward. Um, should we take
Speaker 1: a break before we get into the experiments that the
Speaker 1: researchers did here to test this hypothesis. Yeah, we'll take
Speaker 1: a quick break, but we'll be right back. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: Let's get into some experiments. All right. So we've been
Speaker 1: talking about the study from twenty nineteen by O. Madigan
Speaker 1: at All and they're trying to investigate the origins of
Speaker 1: pointing in young children, and and they're advocating a particular
Speaker 1: hypothesis known as the touch hypothesis, that pointing instincts emerge
Speaker 1: from a child's instinct to reach out and touch things. Uh.
Speaker 1: So they came up with a very interesting group of
Speaker 1: experiments to test this. So this is one of those
Speaker 1: where if you'd asked me, you know, how would you
Speaker 1: test for the touch hypothesis? I would think, I don't
Speaker 1: know how on earth would you study that? But the
Speaker 1: designs I thought were really cool. So the first one
Speaker 1: is what they called the reference fixing test. So the
Speaker 1: setup goes like this. You have test subjects, and this
Speaker 1: included both children and adults. They had children at eighteen months,
Speaker 1: at three years, at six years, and adults and they
Speaker 1: had these different groups point at things. For the older subjects,
Speaker 1: there was a game involving marbles hidden under cups, and
Speaker 1: then the cups were on these shelves and the player
Speaker 1: had to point to cups displayed on the shelf. For
Speaker 1: the eighteen month olds that they played a fun a
Speaker 1: little puppet game. So there was a screen and an
Speaker 1: experiment er uh sitting in front of the screen, and
Speaker 1: a puppet would appear from behind the screen and get
Speaker 1: introduced to the child. They'd be like, oh, hey, this
Speaker 1: is you know, Pete the puppet, and then the puppet
Speaker 1: would disappear and reappear from behind a different part of
Speaker 1: the screen and say hello, And then the experimenter would
Speaker 1: pretend not to see the puppet and ask the child
Speaker 1: to help point out where the puppet went, and then
Speaker 1: thank the child for helping once they did point it out.
Speaker 1: And then so the video recorded all these tests, and
Speaker 1: the experimenters used the video analysis to study the angles
Speaker 1: of the children's fingers when they engaged in this kind
Speaker 1: of pointing. Now, it's commonly assumed. We talked about this
Speaker 1: assumption in the last episode that when you point to
Speaker 1: something with an outstretched index finger. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are kind of you kind of imagine an
Speaker 1: arrow or vector extending out from your finger in the
Speaker 1: direction of the target, and the angle of that arrow
Speaker 1: vector is established by the angle of the length of
Speaker 1: your finger. It's as if your finger just kept extending
Speaker 1: straight out wherever it ended up, pointing would hit the target, right.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, Longler that we were But if pointing
Speaker 1: comes out of an instinct to touch, there might actually
Speaker 1: be a different model that makes more sense. Uh to
Speaker 1: quote the authors here quote. When someone reaches out to
Speaker 1: touch something, the angle of her finger is largely irrelevant.
Speaker 1: It could be horizontal or even vertical. What matters is
Speaker 1: that the fingertip can make contact with the object she
Speaker 1: wishes to touch. If pointing originates in touch, then a
Speaker 1: better predictor of reference ought to be what we call
Speaker 1: the touch line, the vector that runs between a person's
Speaker 1: eye and fingertip while pointing. And it turns out this
Speaker 1: is exactly what the researchers found. They found that for
Speaker 1: all age groups, but especially for eighteen month olds, the
Speaker 1: youngest age group, a more accurate vector to the target
Speaker 1: was created by what they call the touch line. So
Speaker 1: instead of a straight line following the exact angle of
Speaker 1: the finger when extended, it was this imaginary line going
Speaker 1: from the pointing person's eyes to their fingertip to the object.
Speaker 1: So like if you actually, like had the finger just
Speaker 1: extend out in a straight line, it would often be
Speaker 1: way off target. Interacted. Yeah, this is a great instinct
Speaker 1: to explore in the in the experiment. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: find myself experimenting with it right now. Like, what's the
Speaker 1: difference between me pointing at this rack of shoes in
Speaker 1: the closet with me here versus reaching for them? Well,
Speaker 1: I think because of some some illusions of perspective, it
Speaker 1: often feels like what you're doing is you're just creating
Speaker 1: a straight vector that extends out along the same angle
Speaker 1: as your finger and goes to the target. But in fact,
Speaker 1: if you take pictures of people when they're pointing, they're
Speaker 1: they're doing something more like creating a line from their
Speaker 1: line of to their fingertip to the object. And actually,
Speaker 1: if you extended the finger vector, it would go way
Speaker 1: off in some other direction, even though it doesn't quite
Speaker 1: feel like that. There's an interesting observation here, they say
Speaker 1: it quote. It may be noted that although the touch
Speaker 1: line is more reliable than the arrow line in all
Speaker 1: age groups, the touch line is the most accurate in
Speaker 1: the six year olds rather than the adults, as one
Speaker 1: might expect. However, we suspect this is simply due to
Speaker 1: the six year olds producing their gestures more carefully, while
Speaker 1: the adults were more casual in their engagement with the task,
Speaker 1: which I think is probably true, right, Like when adults point,
Speaker 1: they don't usually take care to be really accurate in pointing.
Speaker 1: As you become older, pointing becomes more and more uh
Speaker 1: slangy yeah yeah. Like I was thinking, like, how often
Speaker 1: do I actually point with my finger at something? Like
Speaker 1: I'm specifically pointing out, say a scone at a bakery,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, this is the one I want, not
Speaker 1: that one, not that's that one, but this one. Or
Speaker 1: another case would be if I'm trying to point out,
Speaker 1: say a bird in a tree to my son, and
Speaker 1: and I'm not able to do so, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: with the first couple of reference points, I finally will
Speaker 1: will point my finger, you know, sometimes like like lining
Speaker 1: up my finger, you know, uh, around his head, you know,
Speaker 1: so that he can look down the line of my
Speaker 1: finger and see what I'm talking about. But otherwise I'm
Speaker 1: more likely to be like, hey, look at that tree
Speaker 1: over there, and just sort of casually refer, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe even with multiple fingers to the tree, or even
Speaker 1: with an elbow or something. I feel like that's a
Speaker 1: common casual thing, right, like the sort of twisting of
Speaker 1: the arm, the elbow direction and forearm. Huh. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do it myself now, and it feels strange,
Speaker 1: like a chicken arm, like a bock bock box, kind
Speaker 1: of a chicken dancer box. I think sometimes I point
Speaker 1: with an elbow, especially, I think if my hands are
Speaker 1: occupied and I'm standing up and so I see, okay,
Speaker 1: it's like something over there, I'll be like, hey, over there,
Speaker 1: I point with the elbow kind of a shrug elbow
Speaker 1: gesture okay now, or or a nod of the head
Speaker 1: can do something similar. True, if people were videotaping us
Speaker 1: right now, this would be a magical moment. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're flapping your wings in your closet there,
Speaker 1: I am, um. So there was a second experiment. I
Speaker 1: thought this one was really clever, especially it's since it's
Speaker 1: pretty simple once you actually see it. So it might
Speaker 1: take a minute to picture this correctly, but I'll try
Speaker 1: to do the simple version, the short version. Imagine you're
Speaker 1: sitting somebody across from a box. So you might want
Speaker 1: to imagine like an old BOXYCRT television, right, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of had depth, and then you have them
Speaker 1: point to targets on this box. Now, you could have
Speaker 1: them point to targets that are all on on a TV.
Speaker 1: What would be the screen side, the side facing the participant,
Speaker 1: and they could be in the middle, they could be
Speaker 1: on the left side, they could be on the right side.
Speaker 1: Or what you could do is have some of the
Speaker 1: targets that they need to point out be rotated around
Speaker 1: to the sides of the box, so they need to
Speaker 1: point at a target that would be in the TV analogy,
Speaker 1: on the side of the TV, not on the screen side.
Speaker 1: So they did this test. They you know, had a
Speaker 1: box where you would have to point to things that
Speaker 1: were on the side of the box, and they tested
Speaker 1: this against a control group where the pointing targets were
Speaker 1: just moved to the left or right, but they all
Speaker 1: stayed on the side of the box facing the participant.
Speaker 1: It was just like a two D surface. And what
Speaker 1: was revealed was that compared to control conditions, when the
Speaker 1: target was on the side of the box, people rotated
Speaker 1: their wrists to point at it, rotating the hand and
Speaker 1: exactly the way that they would need to rotate it
Speaker 1: if they were reaching out to touch the target with
Speaker 1: the pad of their index finger. And when I read this,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, I've never realized, but
Speaker 1: I think I do that when pointing Sometimes that that
Speaker 1: the orientation of the object to and it changes the
Speaker 1: orientation of my hand. And so like if I would
Speaker 1: have to reach around something to point to something on
Speaker 1: you know, on the side of a three dimensional object,
Speaker 1: I sometimes I think rotate my hand as if I
Speaker 1: would be reaching around to touch the thing with my fingers.
Speaker 1: I think this is exactly right, yeah, or it's almost
Speaker 1: like you are preparing to extend your arm mr elastic style,
Speaker 1: you know, like I need to get the correct curvature
Speaker 1: and angle as if my arm is about to, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, lengthen out and then touch the side of
Speaker 1: the box. Yes, yes, yes, And they said that sometimes
Speaker 1: this even resulted in drastic twisting of the wrist. Quote.
Speaker 1: In some observed instances in the study, the right hand
Speaker 1: was used to point at the left side of the
Speaker 1: box or vice versa, and the participants rotated their wrist
Speaker 1: in a strenuous way through a hundred and eighty degrees
Speaker 1: to match the orientation of the surface that they pointed at.
Speaker 1: So so you can imagine this, like some people have
Speaker 1: a dominant pointing hand and instead of changing hands to
Speaker 1: rotate easily to point at the side that they would like,
Speaker 1: twist their arm all the way around to point with
Speaker 1: the hand upside down so that they could use their
Speaker 1: dominant pointing hand to point in a way in which
Speaker 1: their fingertip could in theory touch the thing they were
Speaker 1: pointing at. Yeah. I think it's very revealing. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then finally there was a third experiment that was that
Speaker 1: wasn't about yourself pointing, but it was about judging the
Speaker 1: pointing of others. It was about trying to read pointing
Speaker 1: gestures on pictures of other people. And so they would
Speaker 1: show ambiguous images of pointing gestures which could be interpreted
Speaker 1: as pointing a long and arrow line extending from the
Speaker 1: finger or along a touch line going from the eyes
Speaker 1: to the fingertip to the target. Robert I included in
Speaker 1: an example for you to look at here, and they
Speaker 1: found that quote the eighteen month olds in the three
Speaker 1: year olds were more likely to pick out the cup
Speaker 1: the experiment or was looking at in the touch condition
Speaker 1: than in the arrow condition, whereas the nine year olds
Speaker 1: the opposite was the case. The six year olds did
Speaker 1: not show a clear preference, being a chance in both conditions,
Speaker 1: while the adults were well above chance in both conditions.
Speaker 1: So what they found was that erro interpretations, the idea
Speaker 1: of just like you know, the finger extending out along
Speaker 1: the line, aero interpretations of other people's pointing appear to
Speaker 1: emerge and become stronger later in development, whereas touch interpretations,
Speaker 1: where pointing is the line from your eye to your
Speaker 1: fingertip to the object, those dominate among the younger. So anyway,
Speaker 1: I think these experiments are some pretty compelling evidence that
Speaker 1: that touch, the instinct to reach out and touch things,
Speaker 1: could very well be the basis of the pointing gesture
Speaker 1: as it develops in children. Um and the authors believe,
Speaker 1: of course, the same. They believe all three of their
Speaker 1: tests support the hypothesis, the touch hypothesis. But how exactly
Speaker 1: does this transition from touching to pointing occur? Well, we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure, but they have some thoughts about that.
Speaker 1: So the researchers here think that there could be a
Speaker 1: kind of ritualized operant conditioning at work for informative pointing,
Speaker 1: similar to the kind we thought might be present for
Speaker 1: imperative pointing. But it's just a different process. So so
Speaker 1: we know, of course, we were talking about this earlier.
Speaker 1: When infants are exploring objects in their environment, they often
Speaker 1: coordinate different types of sensory exploration. They coordinate visual and
Speaker 1: haptic information gathering. They look and touch at the same time.
Speaker 1: So it's reasonable to propose that the visual attention of
Speaker 1: adults and parents might also be directed by a child's touch.
Speaker 1: And think about you know, if an adult is attending
Speaker 1: to a child when the infant reaches out to touch
Speaker 1: a toy, the parents also begin to pay attention to
Speaker 1: that particular toy. You know, they're like responding to, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is what you're playing with now, or this is
Speaker 1: what you're looking at now. Uh. And then from this
Speaker 1: the author's right quote, once the child finds that she
Speaker 1: can get an adult to pay attention to something by
Speaker 1: touching it, she may begin to make as if to
Speaker 1: touch things that are slightly further away. Parents recognize which
Speaker 1: object the child is aiming to touch and attend to
Speaker 1: that object. The action, originally designed to allow the infant
Speaker 1: to explore an object with the fingertip, becomes a gesture
Speaker 1: that functions to coordinate the attention of infant an adult
Speaker 1: on an object, and pointing is born. So I think
Speaker 1: that's a very interesting interpretation. Yeah, I find this hypothesis
Speaker 1: very uh, very very convincing. Really, um, yeah, it would
Speaker 1: be interesting to see what kind of further studies are
Speaker 1: are possible here. Well, it makes me think about what
Speaker 1: kinds of implicit cognition are still going on in the
Speaker 1: in the brains of you know, older children and even adults, Like, um,
Speaker 1: when you're pointing at things, is there still some part
Speaker 1: of you that is thinking of pointing as touching, and
Speaker 1: how does that affect the psychology pointing. Like, as we
Speaker 1: were talking about in the last episode, there are definitely
Speaker 1: big taboos about, you know, concerning pointing at People are
Speaker 1: pointing at certain kinds of objects, and typically, you know,
Speaker 1: the kinds of things that there are taboos about pointing
Speaker 1: at are things for which there is supposed to be
Speaker 1: some kind of decorum or respect, Like the inanimate objects
Speaker 1: that in some cultures you're not supposed to point out
Speaker 1: would be in some way sacred or holy objects, maybe
Speaker 1: sacred types of animals, or you know, really religiously significant objects. Whereas,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, there's a reason that you're supposed
Speaker 1: to afford respect to other humans, which is why you
Speaker 1: don't point at them with an extended index finger. It
Speaker 1: could be that there's some kind of taboo about uh
Speaker 1: imagined touching that's going on there. Yeah, you have you
Speaker 1: have truly to point at someone is to in a
Speaker 1: sense lay hands on them. Uh then then yeah, it
Speaker 1: would be a huge taboo against that. It makes me
Speaker 1: think about the um you know, there are a few
Speaker 1: different taboos uh in in Thai culture, concerning shoes and feet.
Speaker 1: And and one that that I remember is um a
Speaker 1: taboo against pointing at especially at individuals with the foot um,
Speaker 1: which which is all the more you know, convincing when
Speaker 1: you when you think about what that means in a
Speaker 1: light of these studies, like to point at somebody with
Speaker 1: your foot is essentially to to to touch them with
Speaker 1: your foot. And and therefore, yeah, you can you can
Speaker 1: very very well see how there could that could be
Speaker 1: interpreted as a highly disrespectful gesture. Yeah, that's very interesting,
Speaker 1: But it also makes me think about when it goes
Speaker 1: the other way, when there are ways of um blunting
Speaker 1: the the negative power or the psychological impact or taboo
Speaker 1: of pointing just by not pointing with the extended index fingers.
Speaker 1: So there's some amount of pointing that seems to that
Speaker 1: seems to be naturally associated with touching, uh, no matter
Speaker 1: what kind of body part you're using. But then maybe
Speaker 1: there's there's more of that salience in it's the extended
Speaker 1: index finger and thus like there's less of a taboo
Speaker 1: of of pointing at people if you just do it
Speaker 1: with your arm or with an open hand, because that
Speaker 1: feels less like the infant exploratory touch impulse, right, um, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: It also brings to mind like the ways we greet
Speaker 1: each other. Uh, you know, handshake is a little bit
Speaker 1: further down down from this, but in terms of indicating,
Speaker 1: we already talked about nodding, and that from there there
Speaker 1: we can we can easily go to the realm of
Speaker 1: various ceremonial forms of bowing and bowing as greeting, uh,
Speaker 1: such as such as is used as in Thai culture.
Speaker 1: In fact um, and that seems like a very yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you could you could extrapolated and
Speaker 1: compare it to a head butt, I guess. But for
Speaker 1: the most part, I feel like like bowing, uh, tipping
Speaker 1: your head to someone in a form of greeting. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's largely free of the you know, implicit
Speaker 1: pokiness of the the index finger or a or the kick, uh,
Speaker 1: the implicit kick that comes with gesturing with your your foot, uh,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Here's something I just want to
Speaker 1: test your intuitions on. What do you think or the
Speaker 1: differing connotations of acknowledging a person with an upward nod
Speaker 1: versus acknowledging them with a downward nod. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. I guess the downward nod
Speaker 1: could be interpreted as being judgmental or being, you know,
Speaker 1: a nod of agreement, whereas the upward nod is more
Speaker 1: just hey, uh, you know hello, So exactly, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know one just one just feels more like a
Speaker 1: commentary on what one is observing, and the other one
Speaker 1: feels a lot more just uh an observation or maybe
Speaker 1: we'll have to come back to that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, in all of these you know, obviously there's
Speaker 1: there are so many additional cultural layers that that one
Speaker 1: could unravel. Um, So yeah, I'm not sure exactly what
Speaker 1: the answer would be here if we attempt to answer
Speaker 1: this from a global perspective, because you know, what's the
Speaker 1: different So, for instance, within a culture where bowing is
Speaker 1: is a part of of of traditional regular or formal greetings,
Speaker 1: than than nod, is an odd going to have a
Speaker 1: different weight, Is it going to have a different place
Speaker 1: in um, you know, cultural interactions versus a culture that
Speaker 1: does not have bowing as part of its traditions. Well,
Speaker 1: this is very interesting because this kind of brings me
Speaker 1: to the next thing. I wanted to talk about, which
Speaker 1: was one study I was looking at about cultural variation
Speaker 1: among types of pointing that that humans do. Um, So
Speaker 1: we already talked extensively about the fact that, you know,
Speaker 1: studies have found pointing gestures are pretty much universal phenomena
Speaker 1: in human culture. All cultures point, but there are some
Speaker 1: differences in how exactly we point, or how exactly what
Speaker 1: exact types of pointing are most prevalent within a culture.
Speaker 1: You know, we we we talked about how the extended
Speaker 1: index finger seems to be the most common for especially
Speaker 1: certain kinds of pointing, but like, why not the middle finger,
Speaker 1: why not the thumb? You know, any of these things
Speaker 1: of course could function as a pointing gesture, and there
Speaker 1: have been different ideas about this over time. One is
Speaker 1: that maybe it's just that the natural resting posture of
Speaker 1: the hand, with the muscles and tendons and all that,
Speaker 1: tends to make the the extended index finger the easiest
Speaker 1: thing to point with. You can kind of see this
Speaker 1: in just the way human hands, uh sit when they're
Speaker 1: totally relaxed. Often the index finger is kind of raised
Speaker 1: above the other ones. Well, I mean, mainly I just
Speaker 1: come down to the fact that the index finger is
Speaker 1: the more versatile finger. Like if someone is just beginning
Speaker 1: to type and they are hunting and pecking, they're not hunking,
Speaker 1: hunting and pecking with their middle finger. They're not hunting
Speaker 1: and pecking with their pinky or their ring finger. They're
Speaker 1: using their index finger. Like that is the one. If
Speaker 1: you're gonna scrape some paint off of something, you're to
Speaker 1: use your index finger and its fingernail. Like it's it
Speaker 1: seems to be the most versatile of the digits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think so. I mean, it's like it's it
Speaker 1: is the most accurate part of one of the defining
Speaker 1: properties of the human primate, you know, the precision grip
Speaker 1: where the index finger and the thumb come together. The
Speaker 1: index finger is a little more precise than the thumb,
Speaker 1: is right, Yeah, I mean that's why it is the
Speaker 1: trigger finger. Yeah, that is why the thing it is
Speaker 1: the finger that is traditionally sent into the nostril. H
Speaker 1: I mean, it is. It is the the exploratory digit.
Speaker 1: But you ever see people pick their nose with the
Speaker 1: pinky and that's fun. Well, I guess the well that
Speaker 1: does make sense from a certain standpoints is it is
Speaker 1: the smaller of the of the fingers. Yes, uh huh,
Speaker 1: but I don't recall seeing it offhand, but it makes sense,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not going to question that as a as
Speaker 1: a you know, you know taboos aside is being just
Speaker 1: a very sensible choice. But there are different kinds of
Speaker 1: pointing that are more favored by different cultures around the world.
Speaker 1: Like there are some cultures where lip pointing can be
Speaker 1: found in a fairly prominent way, um, there there are
Speaker 1: other cultures where apparently nose pointing not only exists but
Speaker 1: is is pretty popular. If you're trying to imagine it.
Speaker 1: This is kind of a way of pointing by scrunching
Speaker 1: the face and sort of pointing with the scrunch to nose. Um.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I know this is this is mainly
Speaker 1: identified as being popular in uh, for example, specific language
Speaker 1: cultures of Papua New Guinea, which we'll talk about in
Speaker 1: the second. But I feel like I've done something like
Speaker 1: this in my life, the scrunched nose face point. I
Speaker 1: think it has happened. Well, I can't really speak to
Speaker 1: the scrunching of the nose, but certainly we're talking about
Speaker 1: the you know, nodding up or down. And I think
Speaker 1: if we get more specific about our analysis of these, uh,
Speaker 1: these facial head gestures, we might realize that, Okay, am
Speaker 1: I actually is it really my head that is the
Speaker 1: focal point? Or am I in fact um gesturing with
Speaker 1: my chin or my nose or some other you know,
Speaker 1: specific point on my face. Yeah, that's that's a good point.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to talk about a specific study I
Speaker 1: was looking at called the preference for pointing with the
Speaker 1: hand is not Universal. This was published in the journal
Speaker 1: Cognitive Science in eighteen. Uh. The lead author here was
Speaker 1: somebody I referred to in the last episode who I
Speaker 1: had watched a presentation that he gave about a bunch
Speaker 1: of different kinds of pointing gesture research. But so the
Speaker 1: it's by a Kinsey Cooper writer James Slata, and Raphael
Speaker 1: nun Yez. And this study had a basic sort of
Speaker 1: like moving and stacking of objects task where you would
Speaker 1: take people and you would have one person direct another
Speaker 1: person in how to place some objects around in a space,
Speaker 1: like where to put things, where to stack them. And
Speaker 1: they tested this among us participants, but then also among
Speaker 1: the yep know, people of Papua New Guinea and what
Speaker 1: they found was that speakers in both groups UH used
Speaker 1: plenty of pointing, but there were different preferences in what
Speaker 1: types and shapes of pointing the different groups had. They
Speaker 1: say quote. Whereas the US participants exhibited a clear strong
Speaker 1: preference for manual pointing pointing with the finger, the yup
Speaker 1: Know made balanced use of both non manual and manual forms,
Speaker 1: with no significant preference between the two. And Robert, I've
Speaker 1: got a couple of graphs for you to look at here.
Speaker 1: When you see the data represented, it's very clear that
Speaker 1: like US participants do almost all of their pointing with
Speaker 1: the hand. The hand is clearly favored UM depending on
Speaker 1: other conditions. Among the Upno people, it seems, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe half and half or so roughly half is with
Speaker 1: the hand, but then there's this other strong preference for
Speaker 1: especially pointing with the scrunched snow's gesture. And this difference
Speaker 1: is really interesting, and the authors were trying to account
Speaker 1: for why exactly the would be like, what would cause
Speaker 1: the difference between the cultures. One possible explanation that they
Speaker 1: give is that they say quote. Throughout New Guinea there
Speaker 1: is an emphasis on controlling the broadcasting of communication. UH
Speaker 1: and examples they give here would be a tendency toward circumspection,
Speaker 1: whispering uh inggressive speech, which which is a term for
Speaker 1: speaking while inhaling uh and they write quote. Non Manual
Speaker 1: pointing may thus be part of a repertoire of bodily
Speaker 1: techniques that reduce the broadcasting of communicative signals, as indeed
Speaker 1: some yep No consultants have suggested to us another yep
Speaker 1: No cultural model that may bear on gestural behavior is
Speaker 1: the idea of the easy going person or I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how to pronounce this word, but it is spelled
Speaker 1: y a w o r i or a yaw worri,
Speaker 1: and this basically means a person who is not overactive,
Speaker 1: who's not aggressive, but who is calm and contained in
Speaker 1: a sense a kind of cool illness that there is
Speaker 1: a a cultural value to among many people's of New Guinea.
Speaker 1: So it could be that some variations in cultural values
Speaker 1: about what kind of persona and affect it's admirable to project, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the person who is cool and easy going
Speaker 1: in this way, that might influence whether you would point
Speaker 1: with a certain part of your body or another the
Speaker 1: same way. And maybe American culture that certain values about
Speaker 1: how how it looks, you know, how you can look cool,
Speaker 1: would would influence whether you point with your chin or
Speaker 1: point with a finger. Yeah, that's a very good point.
Speaker 1: But then there are also some practical considerations that might
Speaker 1: explain part of this difference. So, for example, you can't
Speaker 1: point with a finger when your hands are occupied. The
Speaker 1: author's right quote. Manual availability could also affect a community's
Speaker 1: pointing preferences on cultural historical time scales in communities where
Speaker 1: the hands are commonly occupied while communicating, so maybe during
Speaker 1: activities like food processing on manual gesturing could become more
Speaker 1: frequent and eventually carry over to times when the hands
Speaker 1: are free. That makes sense. If I'm carrying a weapon
Speaker 1: and I'm hunting, i can't speak with my hands they
Speaker 1: are otherwise engaged, right, And there there could be all
Speaker 1: kinds of tasks where among certain cultures, like you know,
Speaker 1: you would be using your hands while you're pointing at
Speaker 1: something to indicate something to somebody else. If you're you know,
Speaker 1: cooking together, processing or or preparing food together, doing all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. You know. Another thing is that they
Speaker 1: say manual pointing, you know, using the finger to point
Speaker 1: is considered more precise than facial or other non manual pointing,
Speaker 1: but also less effortful. Uh So, in cultures where precision
Speaker 1: pointing is less often required, say if you are not
Speaker 1: often pointing to a small object distant on the horizon,
Speaker 1: or to a small element within a media display or
Speaker 1: something like that, the efficiency of movement may overtake the
Speaker 1: need for precision and pointing. And the author's right quote
Speaker 1: note that if indeed, you Know speakers observe a principle
Speaker 1: of least effort when pointing, the interesting question becomes not
Speaker 1: why you know speakers often avoid manual pointing, but why
Speaker 1: English speakers so often over extend themselves, Like, why why
Speaker 1: do English speakers have this tendency do waste more effort
Speaker 1: using the hand to point something when that amount of
Speaker 1: precision is not necessary? Yeah, Like if you're engaging in
Speaker 1: a great deal of gesticulation while talking, Yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of it is um perhaps overly boisterous, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is of course something that's very important to
Speaker 1: remember whenever you're studying like cultural differences in communication or
Speaker 1: gestures or something like that, to not think of it
Speaker 1: in terms of Okay, here's how my culture does things.
Speaker 1: That this other culture does things a different way. Why
Speaker 1: are they weird? The question is not why are they weird? Right,
Speaker 1: because they're not weird. It's just like, what explains the difference? Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: I mean all of it, all of it's weird, right, Well,
Speaker 1: of course, yeah it is weird, and that everyone's weird. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then this last explanation that they gave as a
Speaker 1: possible reason here I thought was very interesting. They say
Speaker 1: that precision pointing is less necessary when it's accompanied by
Speaker 1: languages that offer more precision in terms of spatial location
Speaker 1: with words alone. And this is a really interesting possibility.
Speaker 1: It could have to do specifically with the Yepno language.
Speaker 1: They say that the Yepno language quote boasts a highly
Speaker 1: elaborated demonstrative system involving uphill downhill distinctions and a three
Speaker 1: way distance contrast. Such spatially specific demonstratives were used pervasively
Speaker 1: by yep No speakers in our task, whereas U S
Speaker 1: speakers only had the comparatively blunt English demonstratives. Of this
Speaker 1: versus that to work with speakers of languages that habitually
Speaker 1: provide increased spatial precision in their spoken demonstratives, such as
Speaker 1: yup know might have less need for spatial precision in
Speaker 1: the pointing gestures that often accompany those demonstratives. So it
Speaker 1: it may be that it's the fact that the yup
Speaker 1: No language apparently has a richer, more elaborate, and more
Speaker 1: specific lexicon of words and sort of spatial grammar for
Speaker 1: indicating exactly where and what kind of object you're talking about,
Speaker 1: So precision in pointing is less necessary because you can
Speaker 1: point more with words than you can in English. Oh,
Speaker 1: now that is interesting. Uh And and this highlights and
Speaker 1: other things very interesting about different languages, the way that
Speaker 1: space is conceptualized differently in different languages. Yup know is
Speaker 1: an example here where I was looking at some other
Speaker 1: writings about this language that has uh he the study
Speaker 1: mentioned this, this distinction between uphill and downhill. Apparently that's
Speaker 1: just like a common thing for representing all kinds of
Speaker 1: spaces that in English we would not usually think of
Speaker 1: as uphill or downhill. But say, like within a house,
Speaker 1: the door is I don't remember which way it was,
Speaker 1: but like you would just naturally conceptualize the door as
Speaker 1: either uphill or downhill of the rest of the house.
Speaker 1: And there are just lots of other like implicit slope
Speaker 1: associations for describing space that they give them all these
Speaker 1: different ways to sort of specify exactly what region they're
Speaker 1: talking about that are not conventional in English. So it's
Speaker 1: all just a good reminder that that pointing, gesticulation, these
Speaker 1: things do not exist in a vacuum. They exist, of course,
Speaker 1: within a culture, but they also exist alongside language. And
Speaker 1: we have to, you know, consider how spoken language UH
Speaker 1: is involved in cultural tendencies. Right, exactly what you can
Speaker 1: do with language influences what you need what you need
Speaker 1: to accomplish with pointing, and vice versa. What you can
Speaker 1: do with pointing can also influence what kind of words
Speaker 1: you need to use, and so there's definitely a codependent
Speaker 1: kind of feedback system going on there. Right on that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to take one more quick break, but when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to discuss technology. Thank alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've been talking about pointing, and now
Speaker 1: we wanted to make the transition to digital technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: digital because we're talking about digits, right, Um, I do
Speaker 1: I do think it's interesting that we see this emphasis
Speaker 1: on pointing continue on through our technology. So if we
Speaker 1: if we think of the finger is our base system
Speaker 1: for this sort of activity. Then the next obvious place
Speaker 1: is just simple tool use right, a stick or an
Speaker 1: otherwise specialized tool, So I just say a knife or
Speaker 1: even a sword or a spear or something, or for
Speaker 1: a more modern example of something like a chalk piece
Speaker 1: of chalk, or or a marker for a marker board.
Speaker 1: We end up we can use these things as uh
Speaker 1: pointing implements, or we might depend on a specialized pointer,
Speaker 1: say a a stick that we that serves no other
Speaker 1: real purpose except for pointing at things. Yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 1: I hadn't even really thought about that much in this
Speaker 1: episode yet, but that's huge. Yeah, when the teacher points
Speaker 1: with chalk, that sort of becomes a new finger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean this also brings in a whole host
Speaker 1: of new considerations we talked about. If pointing is touching,
Speaker 1: then what we are pointing with and how we are
Speaker 1: pointing with our fingers that influences the way that the
Speaker 1: point is received. Likewise, how do we receive it when
Speaker 1: someone points at us or at something we created or
Speaker 1: what have you with a stick or a weapon, or
Speaker 1: a piece of chalk or a marker or even a
Speaker 1: specialized pointer. How does that alter our relationship between ourselves
Speaker 1: and others, between ourselves and things in our environment. So
Speaker 1: we've all seen a designated pointer before. Uh. They can
Speaker 1: be simple that, they can be ornate, they can be
Speaker 1: made out of would they might be metallic and telescopic
Speaker 1: in construction. Uh. You know frequently you'll see these used
Speaker 1: during presentations, right when one is presenting material on a blackboard,
Speaker 1: a marker board, or some sort of a map. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's often in the scene in movies where the masters
Speaker 1: of war looking at a map to you know, talk
Speaker 1: about some kind of battle or advance or something, and
Speaker 1: they've got that telescoping metal pointer. I've never had one
Speaker 1: of those. Would be cool to have one. They always
Speaker 1: look really cool, don't they. But but of course, in
Speaker 1: all this we also get into this gray area of
Speaker 1: of not only ancient pointing, but items of indication. So
Speaker 1: consider the scepter, for example, which traditionally is, you know,
Speaker 1: accept is the thing you hold in your hand that
Speaker 1: may not have any other real world purpose to it.
Speaker 1: It indicates status, it indicates power, and there have been
Speaker 1: connections to traditions as for instance, in some cultures, a
Speaker 1: shepherd's crook is considered to be a possible predecessor to
Speaker 1: the scepter. It's something that indicates status in a in
Speaker 1: you know, in an actual trade, and then that carries
Speaker 1: over into some sort of a a regal role, uh
Speaker 1: In in other cultures, connections have been made between a
Speaker 1: holy scepter and a backscratcher. So here's the thing that
Speaker 1: had a purpose, but now it has become this thing
Speaker 1: that is more about just a signifier of status. This
Speaker 1: thing about the scepter is making me think back to
Speaker 1: that William Blake painting we talked about in the last
Speaker 1: episode where God is judging at him and he's pointing
Speaker 1: at him, and if you look closely it it appears
Speaker 1: he's holding some kind of wander scepter in his hand
Speaker 1: that extends out to Adam's head basically, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of hard for me to see the scepter. It just
Speaker 1: looks like his finger or some kind of ray of
Speaker 1: light is extending out and going straight into Adam's skull. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this we are getting into the idea of the rod,
Speaker 1: the verge, and of course the wand so in addition
Speaker 1: to any magical powers we might attribute to a rod
Speaker 1: or a verrg or wand we're ultimately talking about a
Speaker 1: stick that can be used for reaching, for pointing, for
Speaker 1: drawing in the dust and sand, for directing people about.
Speaker 1: So you know, when you really start to think about
Speaker 1: all those specialized uses for it, it actually sounds pretty
Speaker 1: magical in its own right. Again, this is an object
Speaker 1: that you you point at somebody with it, and you
Speaker 1: instantly command their attention, and then you point across the
Speaker 1: room and you can instantly draw their attention from themselves
Speaker 1: to that. You can use it to create um images
Speaker 1: of the world in the dust, or to inscribe symbolic
Speaker 1: meaning into the dust. Like, this is a pretty magical item.
Speaker 1: You don't even need to have lightning bolts coming out
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, I mean, we talked in the last
Speaker 1: episode about how pointing is a form of much alike
Speaker 1: language is a form of mind control. We don't often
Speaker 1: appreciate this, but like, uh, there's some studies that show
Speaker 1: that pointing is nearly irresistible. When somebody points, you just
Speaker 1: kind of have to look. It's really hard to resist
Speaker 1: that temptation, and it just captures your mind that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so there's a long tradition of magical items that
Speaker 1: are used in pointed for pointing in both mythology and
Speaker 1: then of course later in fiction. But for an old
Speaker 1: example this consider in the Iliad Homer rights of the
Speaker 1: gods in their magical rods, specifically the rods of Hermes,
Speaker 1: Athena and Searcy. So these are magical items or items
Speaker 1: of focus through which they work their power. Something you
Speaker 1: might point at, say a bunch of sailors, and then
Speaker 1: turn them into pigs with almost Maybe I'm getting too metaphorical,
Speaker 1: but it almost mirrors the way that you can turn
Speaker 1: somebody into a pig by controlling their attention in the
Speaker 1: right way. You know you can. You can really kind
Speaker 1: of alter somebody's nature by making them pay attention to
Speaker 1: what you want them to pay attention to exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: here's a fun example to Pointers can also be quite
Speaker 1: sacred in addition to or innate, So consider the the
Speaker 1: odd a ceremonial pointer, also known as a torah pointer,
Speaker 1: which in Jewish ritual is a means of following the
Speaker 1: text in a in a parchment torah scroll during a
Speaker 1: reading um. Part part of the practice is simply about
Speaker 1: following lines of texts as you read them, But there's
Speaker 1: also both a supernatural aspect to it and a in
Speaker 1: a mundane aspect. So one idea is this is a
Speaker 1: holy text and we should not besmirch it or corrupt
Speaker 1: it or take away its purity by physically touching it.
Speaker 1: But also, uh, parchments are susceptible to damage via human fingers,
Speaker 1: via via the oil or other substances on human fingers,
Speaker 1: and therefore it makes sense to reduce the amount of
Speaker 1: contact that one has with a valuable text like this.
Speaker 1: And so this is where the torah pointer comes in.
Speaker 1: They're typically made of silver, but sometimes other substances are used. Um.
Speaker 1: And you'll often find this, uh, this, this wand that's
Speaker 1: basically it's a short wand or rod and it is
Speaker 1: off and capped with a small hand, a small human
Speaker 1: hand with an index finger extended. This feels very interesting.
Speaker 1: Something is going on here, yeah, with the wandes and
Speaker 1: and the kind of magical power we imbued to the
Speaker 1: finger pointing, especially within a religion where a text itself
Speaker 1: takes on such a sacred dimension that like, um, I
Speaker 1: wonder if having a little pointing object in this way
Speaker 1: is almost like itself an act of of bowing before
Speaker 1: the text or kind of like showing reverence. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it makes me want to do a
Speaker 1: deeper dive or or talk to somebody with with more
Speaker 1: experience and um uh, you know judaic custom and um
Speaker 1: inhibriic ritual. But because because I mean the other side
Speaker 1: of it too is of course, when one is traditionally reading,
Speaker 1: many of you out there listening may do this as well.
Speaker 1: You may take your index finger and use it to read.
Speaker 1: You may go line by line with your index finger
Speaker 1: physically touching the paper. Now Here the question I've never
Speaker 1: actually considered. I always just assumed that using of the
Speaker 1: index finger assists in reading comprehension, that people do that
Speaker 1: because it makes it easier to keep your place and
Speaker 1: follow along. I still, I guess assume that's probably true.
Speaker 1: But is that the case? Is it? Is it actually
Speaker 1: practically useful to do that, or is that something that
Speaker 1: we do out of instinct even though it doesn't affect
Speaker 1: how our reading comprehension. I don't know. I've never I've
Speaker 1: never studied it. There may be, may may well be
Speaker 1: studies about it. I main my main experience with it
Speaker 1: it was, I know, a thing that I used to
Speaker 1: do either with my finger or with like a bookmark,
Speaker 1: and I was kind of encouraged not to do that,
Speaker 1: or you know, it's just the idea was presented that
Speaker 1: it's better better to read without those kind of uh aids,
Speaker 1: and then I kind of fell out of it and
Speaker 1: like then got to the point where I didn't need
Speaker 1: it anyway. So yeah, I I I don't do that myself,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. Perhaps that there are people who
Speaker 1: still read by that, they swear by it and do
Speaker 1: that their whole lives. Yeah, that's an interesting question to me. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe we can look for studies about that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: typography is also going to be a factor in all
Speaker 1: of this, too, right, I mean, depending on how the
Speaker 1: words are laid out, it may be easier to read
Speaker 1: certain text without, um some sort of pointing implement, whereas
Speaker 1: if you're dealing with a traditional uh you know, holy scroll, Uh,
Speaker 1: it may just be easier to to use some sort
Speaker 1: of pointing implement to follow your way through it. That
Speaker 1: makes sense. Now, we've already touched on the laser pointer,
Speaker 1: which continues this tradition into the twentieth century and beyond.
Speaker 1: But we also have to consider as we reach the
Speaker 1: end here. The pointer or cursor on a computer, which
Speaker 1: much like the odd is often presented as a hand
Speaker 1: with an index finger outstretched. Sometimes it's an arrow, of course,
Speaker 1: but other times, or at least in some functions, um
Speaker 1: of the cursor it becomes an index finger. And while
Speaker 1: a computer mouse is obviously not necessary to control a cursor,
Speaker 1: we have other means of controlling it. The mouse is
Speaker 1: an extreme only common interface. And in fact, I was
Speaker 1: reading a two thousand nine Scientific American article by Larry
Speaker 1: Greenmeyer titled the Origin of the Computer Mouse, and the
Speaker 1: author refers to the mouse. He may have been quoting
Speaker 1: someone here, but he refers to the mouse as a
Speaker 1: pointing device. Well, yeah, I think there's some very interesting
Speaker 1: implied psychology going on here with with user design and
Speaker 1: and and the pointing gesture. So when you're pointing on
Speaker 1: a screen, you you might be pointing for the benefit
Speaker 1: of a third party, but you're often not, like you're
Speaker 1: often just by yourself looking at the screen. And yet
Speaker 1: you've got to have this thing to identify where it
Speaker 1: is you want to interact on the screen. And and
Speaker 1: one thing that that seems very interesting to me, is
Speaker 1: that it the pointer, the mouse pointer. In most cases,
Speaker 1: to me, it seems that the the little pointer arrow
Speaker 1: turns into the finger pointing out with the index finger
Speaker 1: when you're ready to click a link on a web page.
Speaker 1: So when you want to go somewhere else, that's when
Speaker 1: you point with the finger. Yeah. When you want to
Speaker 1: essentially push a button, uh, to to activate something, to
Speaker 1: touch something, that's when the finger comes into play. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe the going somewhere else is not a significant because
Speaker 1: I think it's buttons too, right, it's also like radiotomical
Speaker 1: buttons and things like that. Yeah. And then likewise, sometimes
Speaker 1: you have like the full hand for grabbing things and
Speaker 1: dragging things around, right, right, that's the that's the imperative
Speaker 1: pointing from from infancy. Yeah, give me that. So anyway,
Speaker 1: bring and bring all this up is kind of just
Speaker 1: a consideration of where we've continued to go and just
Speaker 1: how deeply ingrained uh, pointing and touching with the index finger,
Speaker 1: how how all of that is key to not only
Speaker 1: the human experience, but then the human experience as it
Speaker 1: is it continues to take on the form of technology.
Speaker 1: I'd be very interested to see some more studies about
Speaker 1: how how digital representations of control such as the mouse
Speaker 1: pointer are incorporated into extended body schema that we am at.
Speaker 1: And you know, the same way that we incorporate physical
Speaker 1: tools into our imagination of our extended body. Surely there's
Speaker 1: some degree to which we do that with things that
Speaker 1: are not even in physical space, but they're representational tools
Speaker 1: on a screen. Yeah. Yeah, to remind everybody, body schema
Speaker 1: is basically your mental idea of what your body is,
Speaker 1: what its limits are, and when we engage in tool use,
Speaker 1: we update our body schema. So if one you know,
Speaker 1: you might have heard the saying, it's like, okay, this
Speaker 1: tool becomes an extension of my body. The sword becomes
Speaker 1: an extension of my body. That is very much what
Speaker 1: is happening when it when a sword or some other
Speaker 1: kind of tool is incorporated into our body schema. All right,
Speaker 1: well there you have it. Our two part look at
Speaker 1: pointing in our you know, attempts to to unravel some
Speaker 1: of like what it is, where it comes from, how
Speaker 1: it varies from culture to culture, and how it how
Speaker 1: it applies to animals, and how it is or is
Speaker 1: not incorporated in our technology. So obviously we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from everyone about this topic. Everyone out there has has,
Speaker 1: uh you know, a lot of experience with the world
Speaker 1: of pointing or being pointed at, or digitally gesticulating with
Speaker 1: your hands, trying to point things out to your dog
Speaker 1: or your cat, or your horse, whatever you know, whatever
Speaker 1: animal you have interacted with. We would love to hear
Speaker 1: your experience. We'd love to hear about your details. Um
Speaker 1: in the meantime, well, first of all, we just hope
Speaker 1: everybody's doing well out there. Everybody's being kind to each
Speaker 1: other out there. And if you want to support our show,
Speaker 1: the best thing you can do is uh well, tell
Speaker 1: people about it, but also rate, review and subscribe wherever
Speaker 1: you get this podcast huge things as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hi, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio. For
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