The development of mathematical marking conventions from prehistory to the present is characterized by a trend from conventions with more iconic relationships to concrete structures of the physical world (such as more pictorial ancient land surveying marks) to marking systems with less-iconic relationships to physical structures (that represent numbers, operations, infinity, and other more abst...

We investigated the use of iconic and deictic gestures during the communication of spatial information. Expert structural geologists were asked to explain one portion of a geologic map. Spatial gestures used in each expert’s response were coded as deictic (indicating an object in the conversational space), iconic (depicting an aspect of an object or event), or both deictic and iconic (indicatin...

Action video game playing has been experimentally linked to a number of perceptual and cognitive improvements. These benefits are captured through a wide range of psychometric tasks and have led to the proposition that action video game experience may promote the ability to extract statistical evidence from sensory stimuli. Such an advantage could arise from a number of possible mechanisms: imp...

This study reports on an experiment examining the impact of iconic graphics on participants’ understanding of domains represented by entity relationship diagrams. Cognitive load theory and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning are used to hypothesize that iconic graphics reduce the cognitive load of model viewers, leading to more complete mental models and consequently improved understand...

This paper presents a study of iconic gestures as attested in a corpus of Greek face-to-face television interviews. This study takes place in an interactional context that is different from the narrative genre that has been primarily examined so far regarding the semantics and the communicative significance of the iconic gestures. We attempt to classify the iconic gestures attested according to...

Recent work regarding the statistics of natural images has revealed that the dominant eigenvectors of arbitrary natural images closely approximate various oriented derivative-of-Gaussian functions; these functions have also been shown to provide the best fit to the receptive field profiles of cells in the primate striate cortex. We propose a scheme for expression-invariant face recognition that...

Languages combine arbitrary and iconic signals. How do iconic signals emerge and when do they persist? We present an experimental study of the role of iconicity in the emergence of structure in an artificial language. Using an iterated communication game in which we control the signalling medium as well as the meaning space, we study the evolution of communicative signals in transmission chains...

The iconic store has recently been challenged on the grounds that data in its favor may have resulted from some procedural artifacts. The display-instruction compatibility and perceptual grouping hypotheses were reexamined in two experiments with the partial-report paradigm. When care was taken to rectify some procedural problems found in Merikle's (1980) study, it was established that the icon...

Humans perform iconic gestures to refer to entities through embodying their shapes. For instance, people often gesture the outline of an object (e.g. a circle for a ball) when referring to it during communication. In this paper, we present a gesture-based object recognition algorithm that enables natural human-computer interaction involving iconic gestures. Based on our analysis of multiple ges...