[IxDA Discuss] Anticipatory Gestures

[Lisa Harper]

Somewhat tangential, but not un-related are studies from gesture and
language researchers. A prominent and very readable work that delves into a
cognitive theory of communication is David McNeill's _Hand and Mind_ (What
Gestures Reveal about Thought). He argues that gestures directly transfer
mental images to visual form and convey ideas that language can't express.
Gesture researchers closely study the timing of gestures wrt to linguistic
communication and it is well known that gestures anticipate meaning in
speech. If you are interested in classification of gestures and also gesture
timing, this is a good place to start. I studied abstract referential
gestures for a dissertation in linguistics before being lured into
interaction design -- fascinating stuff. ;-)

Lisa Harper

On 3/15/07, Keith_Karn <kkarn at frontiernet.net> wrote:
>
> Dan, Josh, and others -
> I studied such anticipatory movements for my dissertation research. I
> was looking at both hand and eye movements. It turns out that we
> regularly move our eye to the object that we intend to click on in
> advance of the hand movement. As the slower hand movement begins to
> close in on the target object, our eyes are typically off looking at
> the next interesting thing even before the mouse click. More details
> here:
>      Karn, K. & Hayhoe, M. (2000) Memory representations guide targeting
> eye movements in a natural task. Visual Cognition. 7:673-703.
> As for the behavior of people apparently selecting random text while
> reading... I do something like that when I'm reading along document on
> the screen and use the highlighting of selected text as sort of a
> bookmark to help me keep my place while scrolling.
>
> As for Josh's point about the "Next" button position changing from
> screen to screen; that isn't so much of a case of anticipatory
> movement, but more a case of requiring unanticipated movement.
>
> Keith Karn
> ------------------------------
> On 3/15/2007 "Josh Viney" <jviney at gmail.com> wrote
> > We've seen very similar behavior when testing search results and photo
> > slideshows. Nothing seems to frustrate users more than when the "Next"
> > and
> > "Previous" links move around.
>
> On 3/15/07, Dan Brown <brownorama at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Something interesting happened in usability testing yesterday. ....
> > one of our users had anticipated a control being in one part of
> > the screen, so he moved the pointer there prior to the screen fully
> > loading.
> > He had good reason to. This particular site was divided into four
> > sections. Three of the four sections located the control in the lower
> > right corner. The fourth in the lower left.
> > Our participant noticed this immediately and pointed it out. The quote
> > that'll go in my report is something like this: "See, I put my mouse
> > here because that's where the others were."....
>
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