informatiesturing

Informatiesturing refers to the deliberate use of gesture to convey information during interpersonal communication. It includes manual and whole-body movements that accompany spoken language and serve to clarify, emphasize, sequence, or articulate complex ideas. The term blends information and gesturing to reflect a focus on how gesture encodes or annotates informational structure within discourse.

Its mechanisms encompass co-speech gestures synchronized with speech, iconic gestures representing concepts, deictic gestures indicating references, and metaphoric gestures mapping abstract relations to spatial form. Cross-cultural variability in gesture meaning is a key consideration, as are context, listener expectations, and task demands. In digital media, informatiesturing also covers movements captured through cameras that influence virtual presence and interface design.

Contexts and applications include education, where instructors use gestures to scaffold information; human–robot or telepresence systems designed to recognize and respond to user gestures; and accessibility technologies that translate gesture into information streams for users with hearing or motor impairments. Research methods often involve video analysis, gesture coding schemes, and experiments comparing gesture-rich versus gesture-poor communication on comprehension and recall.

Critiques note that the field can rely on coding schemes that may oversimplify meaning, that gestures are culturally variable, and that it is important to distinguish informative gestures from ornamental co-speech movements. The concept of informatiesturing remains a developing area within ongoing investigations of multimodal communication and embodied cognition.