Pointing, Part 2

you know, maybe a little bit. Actually, you know, we for one thing, I guess around the house, there's not a lot. I mean, what am I going to point out? Right? I mean, it's it's all a very established environment. We've got a few walks here and there and done, you know, some stuff outside. But I don't know, I haven't done much specific pointing. Um maybe a little bit at like birds and squirrels and all. But um, yeah, I I

found that. I want to say that this these episodes really changed the way I engage in pointing, but it I don't think it has. It's really made me. The area where it has influenced me more is mode noticing how much we depend on the idea of pointing in our language, and in just our our understanding of the world, and in our technology, which I'll get to at the end of this episode. But you wanted to talk some more about animals, right, you didn't get enough animal pointing

in the last episode. Oh yeah, yeah, we we closed out the last episode. And if you did not listen to the last episode, do go back and listen to it, because this is definitely a part one and part two situation here and not just you know, to treatments on a similar topic. So yeah, at the end, we were talking a little bit about dogs and about um elephants and dolphins. I wanted to point out that cats and horses have also been attributed some degree of understanding of

human pointing, at least in some studies. Um Uh, horses, I can, I guess I can understand that one a bit. With cats, I'm I'm very much on the fence with that. I'm a little doubtful, but allegedly at least some cats are able to pick up on that. Um. Now, on the divide between a domestic dog's ability to understand pointing versus a wild wolf's inability to understand pointing, I ran across, uh, some some writings about this from primatologists Friends of All,

who has been a past guest on the show. Yeah. We we interviewed him one time a long time ago. I think actually Christian and I interviewed him about his book called Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? In this very book, are we smart enough to Know How smart animals are? Um? Uh? Friends of All says the following about this domestic dog and wolf divide quote. Wolves may be poor at following human pointing, but when it comes to picking up hints from their

own kind, they beat dogs. The investigators ascribed this con trust to attention rather than cognition. They point out that wolves watch one another more closely, as they rely on the pack for survival, whereas dogs rely on us. That

I think is an excellent point. I mean, so some people I think have tried to say, like, oh, if an animal doesn't understand human pointing gestures, that's like a cognitive limitation of the animals because the animals not smart enough to get what's going on, which I think is ridiculous, Like it doesn't take the ethological point of view into consideration that animals are adapted to certain kinds of social interactions. It's not like that that an animal is not smart

if it's not particularly adapted to human gestures. Yeah, yeah, so yeah. His main point here is that, you know, we have to be very careful about human centric criteria in our understanding and evaluation of animal intelligence. The dog only seems brighter to some because it is so closely aligned with our own cognition again via you know, these thousands of years ers of cohabitation and domestication. Yeah, and I think even this came up in the last episode.

There might even be some evidence to indicate that it's not even all they're just in like the dog's inbred instinct. A lot of it might be literally just exposure to

humans within the dog's own lifetime. And and it's interesting too if if we think again to what pointing essentially is for the human animal, like really boil it down a means of directing the attention of others to something, then it's not It's not like there are not other examples in the wild gaze, body language and vocalization instantly

come to mind. Multiple species on say the African savannah or within a rainforest community, they communicate and or pick up on queues that direct attention towards, say, a common adversary, some sort of a predator creeping into the area. An animal alarm signal is simply an anti predator adaptation. And likewise, especially with some birds, there are also deceptive alarm call is that manipulate these systems. So you know, we have to consider that. We also have to consider alarm pheromones

chemical signals that achieve the same ends. And that's something we we don't only see that in animals. We see examples of this in plants. Now that's very interesting, and I wonder, I don't know, I don't know the answer to this. I wonder if you do, if there's any evidence of pheromonal signaling signaling having directionality to it. So not just saying like, hey, there is something to be concerned about, but hey, there's something right here to be

concerned about. Here's where it is. This would be this would be a fun one to get into. I mean, we've been talking about doing a plant communication and even planned intelligence episode for a while. I think that's something

we should get to this year for sure, totally. Now, other other examples from the animal world reveal just how unnecessary the question is with certain species, uh, consider ants for example, which as you social insects, they're capable of working together to perform complex tasks and and solve rather

interesting problems. We've we've talked about this in the show before, but despite the trappings of our language, when we consider a queen in an in an ant colony, there is no single ant commanding the others, there's no ant pointing, and yet there is this communication based on pheromones, sounds, and touch. That's a very good point, I think, uh, I think we can naively fall into the assumption, yeah, that the queen is in charge of the ant colony, but in fact, there is something in charge of the

ant colony. But it's not a single individual animal. It's a distributed kind of intelligence and directionality. It's almost like the way that a government might be directed by a constitution, but the constitution is in the ants genes. Yeah, So like when we compare the human condition to the ant condition, you know, there's just a lot of stuff that is there's not going to be a really a good one

to one comparison. Though, of course we we end up falling back on that, right because a lot of that is how we innately understand the world without the inside of science, Like how do we understand the ant? We try and put ourselves in the mind of the ant, within the culture of the ant, and we're going to use our own model to judge that by our kind of hierarchies, like who's your boss? But the queen is not the ant's boss, really, the queen is more like

the ants. Uh sex organs. Yeah, it's like, uh, you know, considering the sex organs to be the leader of the human organism. So anyway, those are just some additional thoughts on the the animal realm of pointing and not pointing. But most of what we're gonna be talking about in this part two is going to relate back to the the human condition of pointing at things and what does it mean and how it factors into our larger cognitive picture.

Right now, one of the things we talked about in the last episode is the idea of pointing as a as a pretty much universal human communication property is found in all cultures that arise is very naturally, very young in children all over the place, basically, with the only major known variations being like certain neurological conditions. But so here's an interesting question is, so, if pointing seems to arise naturally in children, uh, you know, there are obviously

cultural variations around conventions for pointing and adults. It looks like children pretty much everywhere start pointing roughly around the same stage and development. Yeah. I think some people say what around by by age one? And I think it's also been said about nine to fourteen months, so basically that window, that's right, Yeah, exactly. So it seems like

this absolutely crucial piece of early communication. And some theorists have argued that pointing is the first exclusively informative gesture that most children display. It's like the child's first type of pure information communication. But the interesting question is how does that happen? How does pointing again in the child? Where does it come from? And how do we learn

to do it? So I want to refer to a study that I was reading by Catholo Madigan, Gregor Cotchell, and Brent Strickland, published in the journal Science Advances in twenty nineteen called the Origin of Pointing Evidence for the touch hypothesis. Uh So, so it's asking this question, where does pointing come from in development? What developmental process leads

to the pointing gesture. So the authors here claim that because pointing is so foundational in social communication, quote, determining the origin of pointing is therefore essential to our understanding of human language and uniqueness. And yet up to now we have known next to nothing about where it comes from. Now this doesn't mean nobody has ever thought about the

issue before this study. There have been a number of hypotheses that researchers have put out there, uh about you know, good guesses about where pointing might come from and what kinds of process is an infancy lead to it? And one of the main ones has been the idea of the reaching hypothesis. So this hypothesis goes like this, Um, what if pointing grows naturally out of a child's reaching for objects they want. So, imagine a child reaching out

for something. You know, Uh, the child wants a cookie. She wants to reach her hand out and grasp it, but it is beyond an arm's length, and then so she's reaching out for it, she can't reach it. But then, of course the god's interfere a parent steps in and gives her the things she wants, hands the cookie to her. Now, children, it's hypothesized that over time you know, kind of like a rat in a skinner box, a child will ritualize themselves to reach a handout toward a desired object through

operant conditioning. So you know, the way operant conditioning would work in a skinner box or any kind of lab experiment is that like a mouse doesn't need to know why pressing a button gets it a food pellet, it just does. And likewise, a child doesn't need to understand at first why reaching toward an object far away often ends up with that object in their hands. It just works through operant conditioning, and the conditioning takes hold and

encourages the behavior. But the authors here note that there there are several reasons this hypothesis is probably not correct for pointing uh or at least this version of the hypothesis uh it at least fails to account for the major type of pointing in question. So remember the difference we talked about in the last episode. I think parents will probably be familiar with this, the difference between imperative

pointing and declarative pointing. Remember, imperative is the kind of pointing of I want that is usually done with an open hand, and it's to get an object that would be kind of like what we're just talking about with reaching for something you want versus a very different kind of thing. Declarative pointing also known as informative pointing, which is look at that. It's the the explicit attempt to direct someone's attention to an object, rather than, you know,

a request to get the object into your hand. And there's plenty of evidence that these two types of pointing are acquired at different stages of development. Not surprisingly, imperative pointing comes first, and the authors here say that the reaching hypothesis might account for imperative pointing, but not for what they call a declarative or what they call informative pointing. Quote.

Since children use imperative points to have things handed to them rather than simply to direct attention, imperative points are produced with an open hand rather than a single index finger, and they feature significantly less vocalizations and joint attention than prototypical pointing gestures. Uh and I thought that was interesting too,

like that. Uh that Apparently having like the look at that type pointing, the informative pointing is tends to be accompanied more by vocal as a aations about what you're pointing at. Which I would have expected kind of the opposite. I would have expected more noises to be made during the like give me that reaching I guess, I guess they give me that reaching is. I mean, it's just more direct, right, it's like that me want you know, like bring that to me, that to me, um, put

that in my mouth kind of a thing. Whereas if you're gesturing to a bird, it's like, what about that bird? What am I looking for? What is my you know, how are we relating to this? You're saying we should try and catch it? We should just stare at it? Is it? Is it? Something good about it? Something bad about it? Something it's doing something, you know, intrinsic to just what it is. You know, there are a lot

of additional questions that arise. Yeah, that's right. The pointing gesture is is far more ambiguous and and could go in a lot more directions. The imperative pointing is much simpler. Yeah, I think you're right. Imperative gesture towards say a cupcake, there it is. There's no question what is desired there, no, no, no, I want to talk about the color of the frosting, you know. Yeah, how often does that happen. So yeah, in the case of the study, we're more curious about

where the later kind of pointing comes from. The informative or declarative. Look at that pointing usually with the index finger instead of the whole hand outstretched. Um So, the next hypothesis that they talk about is the imitation hypothesis. This one is pretty common sensical. The idea is that pointing originates in children imitating the pointing that their parents do. So you see parents pointing and then children start doing

the same thing. That makes sense. I mean, we assume that children learn language by listening to parents and other adults talk, and they pick it up that way, So why not learn this type of communication by imitating their parents. It's very common sensical. But the evidence we have indicates that this is pretty much totally wrong for declarative pointing. Um So, if children pointed by imitation of their parents, for one thing, you would expect to see more cross

cultural variation in how children pick up pointing. An anthropologists do not see this cross cultural variation and how how children pick up pointing. There are like sort of pointing cultures and different conventions of pointing among adults in different cultures, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of variation about how pointing starts to happen in young children. That

makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I guess part of it comes it's one of these things with childhood development, like has it you'd have to carry out like a pointing free child rearing process as an experiment, And how would you even begin to do that, How would you have the commitment to do that? Yeah, totally. Now you can look at it the other way, And actually, I will

look at a study like this in a second. Not so not someone trying to create a pointing free environment for a child, but trying to train a child with lots of exposure to pointing to see what that does. Well, we'll look at that in just a second. But first, just to to quote the authors of the study we're talking about, uh, you know, first of all, they say, the more morphology of early childhood pointing seems pretty much universal.

It's like the extended index finger point with they say, with infants in all cultures pointing pretty much the same way and around the same time and development. So this really makes it seem like it's not based on uh, imitating little variations in how adults in your culture point.

But beyond that, they say, you know, if kids pick up informative pointing by mimicking their parents in naturalistic contexts, you might expect that deliberate attempts to expose young children to lots of pointing gestures would accelerate their adoption of pointing. Right that, like that, they would start to point more and earlier if the adults around them do a whole lot of pointing to train them. And does this happen? Well, this is what I was just talking about. A study

from twelve actually looked into this. It was by Daniel Matthews, Tanya Baine, Elena Levin, and Michael Tomasello in Developmental Science from and this that he had mothers performed daily training with pointing fur their infants, and these would be infants of nine, ten or eleven months of age. And then this was compared with a control group of infants of the same ages who got daily musical training for the

same amount of time. And the researchers here found that quote infants ability to point with the index finger at the end of the study was not affected by the training, but was instead predicted by infants prior ability to follow the gaze direction of an adult. And they say that quote this suggests that prior social cognitive advances, rather than adults socialization of pointing per se, determine the developmental onset

of indexical pointing. So there are some variations in in the adoption of pointing, but it seems like one of the main factors informing that is something about like how well a child follows where an adult is looking naturally and things like that, that not how much pointing they

see happening around them. Okay, so anyway, that makes it look like the imitation of adult pointing is probably not the best or main explanation for what's going on with the uh with with children picking up pointing gestures on their own. So what else could explain it? Well, the authors here they present an alternative hypothesis. They say that declarative or informative pointing originates in the desire to touch things. Well, it is true that children do love to touch things.

A lot of energy has to go into reminding them not to touch things. You take them to an art museum, you take them, uh or even to you know today, with a lot of I'm sure a number of parents are encountering. This is where having to do more and more uh teles schooling, more and more screen time to help them, you know, hang out with friends and and actually get their education. Sometimes they're using their their parents computers and we have to remind them, oh, you don't

actually have to touch the screen. It's not a touch screen. And also and and you could actually hurt the screen by tapping on it like this. Uh So, yeah, kids are very tactile for sure, Yes, totally. I mean, and the authors here talk about this. They talk about the it's a it's especially common in young children to want to not just sample something by one sense at a time, but to have multiple coordinated sensory experiences of an object. So, uh, one of the main ones is to coordinate visual and

haptic information gathering. You want to look at and touch something, and so like the idea of an art museum where you can't touch the paintings is naturally counterintuitive to young children. Yeah, I mean in a sense, you know, they're they're in kind of a different sense realm, you know. There you have to think of them as kind of like little alien probes that have landed on another world and they

need to collect all of this data. So while you know, you and I we can go to uh, you know, an art museum or a museum full of like ancient artifacts, and we're totally fine not touching everything. We we have a general idea what it would feel if we did, but you do not necessarily the case with the child and uh. And it is wonderful to see so many museums these days, uh incorporating some sort of touch exhibit for the younger children so as to you know, understanding

that they must touch something. So here, here is something you can touch to get a literally get a feel for it. Well, I don't know, maybe I'm about to reveal something about my own infantile mentality, but I, uh, I actively have to resist to the desire to touch when I go into museums and I'm looking at sculptures and stuff. I don't know if other adults are like this and they just don't talk about it. Uh, maybe

this reveals something about me. But like when I, you know, I was recently last year, I was at the Louver and I wanted to touch the sculptures. I had to like keep reminding myself, like, you can't touch that huh. Now, I wonder I wonder where it comes from though, and you specifically, because on one hand, there is this what we were talking about here, the childlike desire to touch uh,

just the human need for sensory information about something. But on the other hand, I wonder if it is tied at all to uh, something that Christian I did an episode about years ago, the call of the void, you know, the desire to do the thing that is prohibited, such as touch the mona Lisa or or what have you. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I also do experience that sometimes, like just like a taboo is presented and you have that instinct to violated automatically, which you have to resist. Yeah,

maybe a little bit of both, who knows. I will say that I feel like my intuitive desire to touch things tends to be correlated to um to how ancient and mysterious they are. Yeah. Yeah, I I could definitely can definitely get that. When you see like a you know, a piece of art that is thousands of years old, there is a there is this this feeling that you

know you do want to touch it. There is a desire to engage with it physically by confessing all this, I'm not trying to give you other adults out there license to go in museums and touch things. Don't touch the sculptures, folks. Human remains are another one. I think when when there are actual human remains in a in some sort of an exhibit, there is this sort of you know, maybe slightly ghoulish, you know, feeling like you want to touch this thing that was once a part

of a living being. You know, yeah, totally, I want to touch the mummy. It's true. I mean, though, I think that kind of thing makes a lot more sense for children because when you're when you're a young child, you're not just I mean, when when you're a young child, coordinating visual and haptic feedback is actually informative. You are learning things from that that I think an adult touching

a mummy is probably not really learning. When you're a child, you're still trying to coordinate your your relationships of what things look like versus what they feel like, and as an adult you don't need to do that as much anymore. So it's probably less excuse for me. So before anyway, but back to the STU. Before the experiment, the authors think that there was already a bit of good reason for thinking that pointing begins with the touch instinct, and

they give some examples based on previous research. For example, I thought this was pretty interesting. They say, quote, children use a prototypical pointing hand shape to explore objects, tactually from as early as six months, and as the frequency of pointing gestures increases from around nine months of age, the frequency of this kind of exploratory touch decreases, suggesting that pointing is somehow taking over from touch. Oh you know, I have to return to the museum for a second here, Joe,

because have you ever had this situation? Hopefully you and and listeners out there, hopefully none of you have had this direct experience yourself, But I've seen this happen to other people where you'll have a section of the museum, you have a lot of security there, and someone is pointing at the artwork and they're reprimanded for it. Uh huh, yes,

like the point too close. Yeah, And I wonder if part of that is, like again comes down to the idea that you know, what a what is the line between pointing at something and touching it or touching it accidentally? But then also perhaps it gets down to a deeper connection between pointing and touching. I think that could be

exactly right. I mean, so like it appears there's this correlation as the as the exploratory touching of objects decreases, the pointing instinct increases, almost as if you're trading one for the other. That that's very interesting to me. There there could be a lot of a lot of information in that little nugget. I think we should keep that in mind as we go forward. Um, should we take a break before we get into the experiments that the

researchers did here to test this hypothesis. Yeah, we'll take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Alright, we're back. Let's get into some experiments. All right. So we've been talking about the study from twenty nineteen by O. Madigan at All and they're trying to investigate the origins of pointing in young children, and and they're advocating a particular hypothesis known as the touch hypothesis, that pointing instincts emerge

from a child's instinct to reach out and touch things. Uh. So they came up with a very interesting group of experiments to test this. So this is one of those where if you'd asked me, you know, how would you test for the touch hypothesis? I would think, I don't know how on earth would you study that? But the designs I thought were really cool. So the first one is what they called the reference fixing test. So the setup goes like this. You have test subjects, and this

included both children and adults. They had children at eighteen months, at three years, at six years, and adults and they had these different groups point at things. For the older subjects, there was a game involving marbles hidden under cups, and then the cups were on these shelves and the player had to point to cups displayed on the shelf. For the eighteen month olds that they played a fun a

little puppet game. So there was a screen and an experiment er uh sitting in front of the screen, and a puppet would appear from behind the screen and get

introduced to the child. They'd be like, oh, hey, this is you know, Pete the puppet, and then the puppet would disappear and reappear from behind a different part of the screen and say hello, And then the experimenter would pretend not to see the puppet and ask the child to help point out where the puppet went, and then thank the child for helping once they did point it out.

And then so the video recorded all these tests, and the experimenters used the video analysis to study the angles of the children's fingers when they engaged in this kind of pointing. Now, it's commonly assumed. We talked about this assumption in the last episode that when you point to

something with an outstretched index finger. I think a lot of people are kind of you kind of imagine an arrow or vector extending out from your finger in the direction of the target, and the angle of that arrow vector is established by the angle of the length of your finger. It's as if your finger just kept extending straight out wherever it ended up, pointing would hit the target, right.

That's the thing, Longler that we were But if pointing comes out of an instinct to touch, there might actually be a different model that makes more sense. Uh to quote the authors here quote. When someone reaches out to touch something, the angle of her finger is largely irrelevant. It could be horizontal or even vertical. What matters is that the fingertip can make contact with the object she

wishes to touch. If pointing originates in touch, then a better predictor of reference ought to be what we call the touch line, the vector that runs between a person's eye and fingertip while pointing. And it turns out this is exactly what the researchers found. They found that for all age groups, but especially for eighteen month olds, the youngest age group, a more accurate vector to the target

was created by what they call the touch line. So instead of a straight line following the exact angle of the finger when extended, it was this imaginary line going from the pointing person's eyes to their fingertip to the object. So like if you actually, like had the finger just extend out in a straight line, it would often be way off target. Interacted. Yeah, this is a great instinct to explore in the in the experiment. Yeah, yeah, I

find myself experimenting with it right now. Like, what's the difference between me pointing at this rack of shoes in the closet with me here versus reaching for them? Well, I think because of some some illusions of perspective, it often feels like what you're doing is you're just creating a straight vector that extends out along the same angle

as your finger and goes to the target. But in fact, if you take pictures of people when they're pointing, they're they're doing something more like creating a line from their line of to their fingertip to the object. And actually, if you extended the finger vector, it would go way off in some other direction, even though it doesn't quite feel like that. There's an interesting observation here, they say

it quote. It may be noted that although the touch line is more reliable than the arrow line in all age groups, the touch line is the most accurate in the six year olds rather than the adults, as one

might expect. However, we suspect this is simply due to the six year olds producing their gestures more carefully, while the adults were more casual in their engagement with the task, which I think is probably true, right, Like when adults point, they don't usually take care to be really accurate in pointing. As you become older, pointing becomes more and more uh slangy yeah yeah. Like I was thinking, like, how often

do I actually point with my finger at something? Like I'm specifically pointing out, say a scone at a bakery, and I'm like, this is the one I want, not

that one, not that's that one, but this one. Or another case would be if I'm trying to point out, say a bird in a tree to my son, and and I'm not able to do so, uh, you know, with the first couple of reference points, I finally will will point my finger, you know, sometimes like like lining up my finger, you know, uh, around his head, you know, so that he can look down the line of my

finger and see what I'm talking about. But otherwise I'm more likely to be like, hey, look at that tree over there, and just sort of casually refer, you know, maybe even with multiple fingers to the tree, or even with an elbow or something. I feel like that's a common casual thing, right, like the sort of twisting of the arm, the elbow direction and forearm. Huh. I don't know. I'm trying to do it myself now, and it feels strange, like a chicken arm, like a bock bock box, kind

of a chicken dancer box. I think sometimes I point with an elbow, especially, I think if my hands are occupied and I'm standing up and so I see, okay, it's like something over there, I'll be like, hey, over there, I point with the elbow kind of a shrug elbow gesture okay now, or or a nod of the head can do something similar. True, if people were videotaping us right now, this would be a magical moment. I don't know if you're flapping your wings in your closet there,

I am, um. So there was a second experiment. I thought this one was really clever, especially it's since it's pretty simple once you actually see it. So it might take a minute to picture this correctly, but I'll try to do the simple version, the short version. Imagine you're sitting somebody across from a box. So you might want to imagine like an old BOXYCRT television, right, you know, the kind of had depth, and then you have them

point to targets on this box. Now, you could have them point to targets that are all on on a TV. What would be the screen side, the side facing the participant, and they could be in the middle, they could be on the left side, they could be on the right side. Or what you could do is have some of the targets that they need to point out be rotated around to the sides of the box, so they need to point at a target that would be in the TV analogy, on the side of the TV, not on the screen side.

So they did this test. They you know, had a box where you would have to point to things that were on the side of the box, and they tested this against a control group where the pointing targets were just moved to the left or right, but they all stayed on the side of the box facing the participant.

It was just like a two D surface. And what was revealed was that compared to control conditions, when the target was on the side of the box, people rotated their wrists to point at it, rotating the hand and exactly the way that they would need to rotate it if they were reaching out to touch the target with

the pad of their index finger. And when I read this, I was like, oh my god, I've never realized, but I think I do that when pointing Sometimes that that the orientation of the object to and it changes the orientation of my hand. And so like if I would have to reach around something to point to something on you know, on the side of a three dimensional object, I sometimes I think rotate my hand as if I would be reaching around to touch the thing with my fingers.

I think this is exactly right, yeah, or it's almost like you are preparing to extend your arm mr elastic style, you know, like I need to get the correct curvature and angle as if my arm is about to, uh, you know, lengthen out and then touch the side of the box. Yes, yes, yes, And they said that sometimes this even resulted in drastic twisting of the wrist. Quote.

In some observed instances in the study, the right hand was used to point at the left side of the box or vice versa, and the participants rotated their wrist in a strenuous way through a hundred and eighty degrees to match the orientation of the surface that they pointed at.

So so you can imagine this, like some people have a dominant pointing hand and instead of changing hands to rotate easily to point at the side that they would like, twist their arm all the way around to point with the hand upside down so that they could use their dominant pointing hand to point in a way in which their fingertip could in theory touch the thing they were

pointing at. Yeah. I think it's very revealing. Uh. And then finally there was a third experiment that was that wasn't about yourself pointing, but it was about judging the pointing of others. It was about trying to read pointing gestures on pictures of other people. And so they would show ambiguous images of pointing gestures which could be interpreted as pointing a long and arrow line extending from the finger or along a touch line going from the eyes

to the fingertip to the target. Robert I included in an example for you to look at here, and they found that quote the eighteen month olds in the three year olds were more likely to pick out the cup the experiment or was looking at in the touch condition than in the arrow condition, whereas the nine year olds the opposite was the case. The six year olds did not show a clear preference, being a chance in both conditions, while the adults were well above chance in both conditions.

So what they found was that erro interpretations, the idea of just like you know, the finger extending out along the line, aero interpretations of other people's pointing appear to emerge and become stronger later in development, whereas touch interpretations, where pointing is the line from your eye to your

fingertip to the object, those dominate among the younger. So anyway, I think these experiments are some pretty compelling evidence that that touch, the instinct to reach out and touch things, could very well be the basis of the pointing gesture as it develops in children. Um and the authors believe, of course, the same. They believe all three of their tests support the hypothesis, the touch hypothesis. But how exactly

does this transition from touching to pointing occur? Well, we don't know for sure, but they have some thoughts about that. So the researchers here think that there could be a kind of ritualized operant conditioning at work for informative pointing, similar to the kind we thought might be present for imperative pointing. But it's just a different process. So so we know, of course, we were talking about this earlier. When infants are exploring objects in their environment, they often

coordinate different types of sensory exploration. They coordinate visual and haptic information gathering. They look and touch at the same time. So it's reasonable to propose that the visual attention of adults and parents might also be directed by a child's touch. And think about you know, if an adult is attending to a child when the infant reaches out to touch a toy, the parents also begin to pay attention to

that particular toy. You know, they're like responding to, Oh, this is what you're playing with now, or this is what you're looking at now. Uh. And then from this the author's right quote, once the child finds that she can get an adult to pay attention to something by touching it, she may begin to make as if to touch things that are slightly further away. Parents recognize which object the child is aiming to touch and attend to

that object. The action, originally designed to allow the infant to explore an object with the fingertip, becomes a gesture that functions to coordinate the attention of infant an adult on an object, and pointing is born. So I think that's a very interesting interpretation. Yeah, I find this hypothesis very uh, very very convincing. Really, um, yeah, it would be interesting to see what kind of further studies are

are possible here. Well, it makes me think about what kinds of implicit cognition are still going on in the in the brains of you know, older children and even adults, Like, um, when you're pointing at things, is there still some part of you that is thinking of pointing as touching, and

how does that affect the psychology pointing. Like, as we were talking about in the last episode, there are definitely big taboos about, you know, concerning pointing at People are pointing at certain kinds of objects, and typically, you know, the kinds of things that there are taboos about pointing at are things for which there is supposed to be some kind of decorum or respect, Like the inanimate objects that in some cultures you're not supposed to point out

would be in some way sacred or holy objects, maybe sacred types of animals, or you know, really religiously significant objects. Whereas, of course, you know, there's a reason that you're supposed to afford respect to other humans, which is why you don't point at them with an extended index finger. It could be that there's some kind of taboo about uh imagined touching that's going on there. Yeah, you have you have truly to point at someone is to in a

sense lay hands on them. Uh then then yeah, it would be a huge taboo against that. It makes me think about the um you know, there are a few different taboos uh in in Thai culture, concerning shoes and feet.

And and one that that I remember is um a taboo against pointing at especially at individuals with the foot um, which which is all the more you know, convincing when you when you think about what that means in a light of these studies, like to point at somebody with your foot is essentially to to to touch them with your foot. And and therefore, yeah, you can you can very very well see how there could that could be

interpreted as a highly disrespectful gesture. Yeah, that's very interesting, But it also makes me think about when it goes the other way, when there are ways of um blunting the the negative power or the psychological impact or taboo of pointing just by not pointing with the extended index fingers. So there's some amount of pointing that seems to that seems to be naturally associated with touching, uh, no matter

what kind of body part you're using. But then maybe there's there's more of that salience in it's the extended index finger and thus like there's less of a taboo of of pointing at people if you just do it with your arm or with an open hand, because that feels less like the infant exploratory touch impulse, right, um, yeah, absolutely. It also brings to mind like the ways we greet

each other. Uh, you know, handshake is a little bit further down down from this, but in terms of indicating, we already talked about nodding, and that from there there we can we can easily go to the realm of various ceremonial forms of bowing and bowing as greeting, uh, such as such as is used as in Thai culture. In fact um, and that seems like a very yeah. I mean, I guess you could you could extrapolated and

compare it to a head butt, I guess. But for the most part, I feel like like bowing, uh, tipping your head to someone in a form of greeting. You know, it's it's it's largely free of the you know, implicit pokiness of the the index finger or a or the kick, uh, the implicit kick that comes with gesturing with your your foot, uh, that sort of thing. Here's something I just want to test your intuitions on. What do you think or the differing connotations of acknowledging a person with an upward nod

versus acknowledging them with a downward nod. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. I guess the downward nod could be interpreted as being judgmental or being, you know, a nod of agreement, whereas the upward nod is more just hey, uh, you know hello, So exactly, Yeah, I don't know one just one just feels more like a commentary on what one is observing, and the other one feels a lot more just uh an observation or maybe

we'll have to come back to that. Yeah, I mean, of course, in all of these you know, obviously there's there are so many additional cultural layers that that one

could unravel. Um, So yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the answer would be here if we attempt to answer this from a global perspective, because you know, what's the different So, for instance, within a culture where bowing is is a part of of of traditional regular or formal greetings, than than nod, is an odd going to have a different weight, Is it going to have a different place in um, you know, cultural interactions versus a culture that

does not have bowing as part of its traditions. Well, this is very interesting because this kind of brings me to the next thing. I wanted to talk about, which was one study I was looking at about cultural variation among types of pointing that that humans do. Um, So we already talked extensively about the fact that, you know, studies have found pointing gestures are pretty much universal phenomena

in human culture. All cultures point, but there are some differences in how exactly we point, or how exactly what exact types of pointing are most prevalent within a culture. You know, we we we talked about how the extended index finger seems to be the most common for especially certain kinds of pointing, but like, why not the middle finger, why not the thumb? You know, any of these things of course could function as a pointing gesture, and there

have been different ideas about this over time. One is that maybe it's just that the natural resting posture of the hand, with the muscles and tendons and all that, tends to make the the extended index finger the easiest thing to point with. You can kind of see this in just the way human hands, uh sit when they're totally relaxed. Often the index finger is kind of raised above the other ones. Well, I mean, mainly I just come down to the fact that the index finger is

the more versatile finger. Like if someone is just beginning to type and they are hunting and pecking, they're not hunking, hunting and pecking with their middle finger. They're not hunting and pecking with their pinky or their ring finger. They're using their index finger. Like that is the one. If you're gonna scrape some paint off of something, you're to use your index finger and its fingernail. Like it's it seems to be the most versatile of the digits. Yeah,

and I think so. I mean, it's like it's it is the most accurate part of one of the defining properties of the human primate, you know, the precision grip where the index finger and the thumb come together. The index finger is a little more precise than the thumb, is right, Yeah, I mean that's why it is the trigger finger. Yeah, that is why the thing it is the finger that is traditionally sent into the nostril. H I mean, it is. It is the the exploratory digit.

But you ever see people pick their nose with the pinky and that's fun. Well, I guess the well that does make sense from a certain standpoints is it is the smaller of the of the fingers. Yes, uh huh, but I don't recall seeing it offhand, but it makes sense, Like I'm not going to question that as a as a you know, you know taboos aside is being just a very sensible choice. But there are different kinds of pointing that are more favored by different cultures around the world.

Like there are some cultures where lip pointing can be found in a fairly prominent way, um, there there are other cultures where apparently nose pointing not only exists but is is pretty popular. If you're trying to imagine it. This is kind of a way of pointing by scrunching the face and sort of pointing with the scrunch to nose. Um. And in fact, I know this is this is mainly identified as being popular in uh, for example, specific language cultures of Papua New Guinea, which we'll talk about in

the second. But I feel like I've done something like this in my life, the scrunched nose face point. I think it has happened. Well, I can't really speak to the scrunching of the nose, but certainly we're talking about the you know, nodding up or down. And I think if we get more specific about our analysis of these, uh, these facial head gestures, we might realize that, Okay, am I actually is it really my head that is the

focal point? Or am I in fact um gesturing with my chin or my nose or some other you know, specific point on my face. Yeah, that's that's a good point. So I wanted to talk about a specific study I was looking at called the preference for pointing with the hand is not Universal. This was published in the journal Cognitive Science in eighteen. Uh. The lead author here was somebody I referred to in the last episode who I had watched a presentation that he gave about a bunch

of different kinds of pointing gesture research. But so the it's by a Kinsey Cooper writer James Slata, and Raphael nun Yez. And this study had a basic sort of like moving and stacking of objects task where you would take people and you would have one person direct another person in how to place some objects around in a space,

like where to put things, where to stack them. And they tested this among us participants, but then also among the yep know, people of Papua New Guinea and what they found was that speakers in both groups UH used plenty of pointing, but there were different preferences in what types and shapes of pointing the different groups had. They

say quote. Whereas the US participants exhibited a clear strong preference for manual pointing pointing with the finger, the yup Know made balanced use of both non manual and manual forms, with no significant preference between the two. And Robert, I've got a couple of graphs for you to look at here. When you see the data represented, it's very clear that like US participants do almost all of their pointing with the hand. The hand is clearly favored UM depending on

other conditions. Among the Upno people, it seems, you know, maybe half and half or so roughly half is with the hand, but then there's this other strong preference for especially pointing with the scrunched snow's gesture. And this difference is really interesting, and the authors were trying to account for why exactly the would be like, what would cause the difference between the cultures. One possible explanation that they give is that they say quote. Throughout New Guinea there

is an emphasis on controlling the broadcasting of communication. UH and examples they give here would be a tendency toward circumspection, whispering uh inggressive speech, which which is a term for

speaking while inhaling uh and they write quote. Non Manual pointing may thus be part of a repertoire of bodily techniques that reduce the broadcasting of communicative signals, as indeed some yep No consultants have suggested to us another yep No cultural model that may bear on gestural behavior is the idea of the easy going person or I'm not sure how to pronounce this word, but it is spelled y a w o r i or a yaw worri, and this basically means a person who is not overactive,

who's not aggressive, but who is calm and contained in a sense a kind of cool illness that there is a a cultural value to among many people's of New Guinea. So it could be that some variations in cultural values about what kind of persona and affect it's admirable to project, like, you know, the person who is cool and easy going in this way, that might influence whether you would point with a certain part of your body or another the

same way. And maybe American culture that certain values about how how it looks, you know, how you can look cool, would would influence whether you point with your chin or point with a finger. Yeah, that's a very good point. But then there are also some practical considerations that might explain part of this difference. So, for example, you can't point with a finger when your hands are occupied. The

author's right quote. Manual availability could also affect a community's pointing preferences on cultural historical time scales in communities where the hands are commonly occupied while communicating, so maybe during activities like food processing on manual gesturing could become more frequent and eventually carry over to times when the hands

are free. That makes sense. If I'm carrying a weapon and I'm hunting, i can't speak with my hands they are otherwise engaged, right, And there there could be all kinds of tasks where among certain cultures, like you know, you would be using your hands while you're pointing at something to indicate something to somebody else. If you're you know, cooking together, processing or or preparing food together, doing all

kinds of things. You know. Another thing is that they say manual pointing, you know, using the finger to point is considered more precise than facial or other non manual pointing, but also less effortful. Uh So, in cultures where precision pointing is less often required, say if you are not often pointing to a small object distant on the horizon, or to a small element within a media display or something like that, the efficiency of movement may overtake the

need for precision and pointing. And the author's right quote note that if indeed, you Know speakers observe a principle of least effort when pointing, the interesting question becomes not why you know speakers often avoid manual pointing, but why English speakers so often over extend themselves, Like, why why do English speakers have this tendency do waste more effort using the hand to point something when that amount of

precision is not necessary? Yeah, Like if you're engaging in a great deal of gesticulation while talking, Yeah, a lot of it is um perhaps overly boisterous, you know. Yeah, And this is of course something that's very important to remember whenever you're studying like cultural differences in communication or gestures or something like that, to not think of it in terms of Okay, here's how my culture does things. That this other culture does things a different way. Why

are they weird? The question is not why are they weird? Right, because they're not weird. It's just like, what explains the difference? Yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean all of it, all of it's weird, right, Well, of course, yeah it is weird, and that everyone's weird. Yeah. But then this last explanation that they gave as a

possible reason here I thought was very interesting. They say that precision pointing is less necessary when it's accompanied by languages that offer more precision in terms of spatial location with words alone. And this is a really interesting possibility. It could have to do specifically with the Yepno language. They say that the Yepno language quote boasts a highly elaborated demonstrative system involving uphill downhill distinctions and a three

way distance contrast. Such spatially specific demonstratives were used pervasively by yep No speakers in our task, whereas U S speakers only had the comparatively blunt English demonstratives. Of this versus that to work with speakers of languages that habitually provide increased spatial precision in their spoken demonstratives, such as yup know might have less need for spatial precision in

the pointing gestures that often accompany those demonstratives. So it it may be that it's the fact that the yup No language apparently has a richer, more elaborate, and more specific lexicon of words and sort of spatial grammar for indicating exactly where and what kind of object you're talking about, So precision in pointing is less necessary because you can point more with words than you can in English. Oh,

now that is interesting. Uh And and this highlights and other things very interesting about different languages, the way that space is conceptualized differently in different languages. Yup know is an example here where I was looking at some other writings about this language that has uh he the study mentioned this, this distinction between uphill and downhill. Apparently that's just like a common thing for representing all kinds of spaces that in English we would not usually think of

as uphill or downhill. But say, like within a house, the door is I don't remember which way it was, but like you would just naturally conceptualize the door as either uphill or downhill of the rest of the house. And there are just lots of other like implicit slope associations for describing space that they give them all these different ways to sort of specify exactly what region they're

talking about that are not conventional in English. So it's all just a good reminder that that pointing, gesticulation, these things do not exist in a vacuum. They exist, of course, within a culture, but they also exist alongside language. And we have to, you know, consider how spoken language UH is involved in cultural tendencies. Right, exactly what you can do with language influences what you need what you need

to accomplish with pointing, and vice versa. What you can do with pointing can also influence what kind of words you need to use, and so there's definitely a codependent kind of feedback system going on there. Right on that note, we're going to take one more quick break, but when we come back, we're going to discuss technology. Thank alright, we're back. So we've been talking about pointing, and now

we wanted to make the transition to digital technology. Yeah, digital because we're talking about digits, right, Um, I do I do think it's interesting that we see this emphasis on pointing continue on through our technology. So if we if we think of the finger is our base system

for this sort of activity. Then the next obvious place is just simple tool use right, a stick or an otherwise specialized tool, So I just say a knife or even a sword or a spear or something, or for a more modern example of something like a chalk piece of chalk, or or a marker for a marker board. We end up we can use these things as uh pointing implements, or we might depend on a specialized pointer, say a a stick that we that serves no other

real purpose except for pointing at things. Yeah, that's funny. I hadn't even really thought about that much in this episode yet, but that's huge. Yeah, when the teacher points with chalk, that sort of becomes a new finger. Yeah, and I mean this also brings in a whole host of new considerations we talked about. If pointing is touching, then what we are pointing with and how we are pointing with our fingers that influences the way that the

point is received. Likewise, how do we receive it when someone points at us or at something we created or what have you with a stick or a weapon, or a piece of chalk or a marker or even a specialized pointer. How does that alter our relationship between ourselves and others, between ourselves and things in our environment. So we've all seen a designated pointer before. Uh. They can be simple that, they can be ornate, they can be made out of would they might be metallic and telescopic

in construction. Uh. You know frequently you'll see these used during presentations, right when one is presenting material on a blackboard, a marker board, or some sort of a map. Yeah, it's often in the scene in movies where the masters of war looking at a map to you know, talk about some kind of battle or advance or something, and they've got that telescoping metal pointer. I've never had one of those. Would be cool to have one. They always

look really cool, don't they. But but of course, in all this we also get into this gray area of of not only ancient pointing, but items of indication. So consider the scepter, for example, which traditionally is, you know, accept is the thing you hold in your hand that may not have any other real world purpose to it.

It indicates status, it indicates power, and there have been connections to traditions as for instance, in some cultures, a shepherd's crook is considered to be a possible predecessor to the scepter. It's something that indicates status in a in you know, in an actual trade, and then that carries over into some sort of a a regal role, uh In in other cultures, connections have been made between a

holy scepter and a backscratcher. So here's the thing that had a purpose, but now it has become this thing that is more about just a signifier of status. This thing about the scepter is making me think back to that William Blake painting we talked about in the last episode where God is judging at him and he's pointing at him, and if you look closely it it appears he's holding some kind of wander scepter in his hand that extends out to Adam's head basically, but it's kind

of hard for me to see the scepter. It just looks like his finger or some kind of ray of light is extending out and going straight into Adam's skull. Yeah. Yeah, And this we are getting into the idea of the rod, the verge, and of course the wand so in addition to any magical powers we might attribute to a rod or a verrg or wand we're ultimately talking about a stick that can be used for reaching, for pointing, for drawing in the dust and sand, for directing people about.

So you know, when you really start to think about all those specialized uses for it, it actually sounds pretty magical in its own right. Again, this is an object that you you point at somebody with it, and you instantly command their attention, and then you point across the room and you can instantly draw their attention from themselves to that. You can use it to create um images of the world in the dust, or to inscribe symbolic meaning into the dust. Like, this is a pretty magical item.

You don't even need to have lightning bolts coming out of it. Yeah, I mean, we talked in the last episode about how pointing is a form of much alike language is a form of mind control. We don't often appreciate this, but like, uh, there's some studies that show that pointing is nearly irresistible. When somebody points, you just kind of have to look. It's really hard to resist

that temptation, and it just captures your mind that way. Yeah, And so there's a long tradition of magical items that are used in pointed for pointing in both mythology and then of course later in fiction. But for an old example this consider in the Iliad Homer rights of the gods in their magical rods, specifically the rods of Hermes, Athena and Searcy. So these are magical items or items

of focus through which they work their power. Something you might point at, say a bunch of sailors, and then turn them into pigs with almost Maybe I'm getting too metaphorical, but it almost mirrors the way that you can turn somebody into a pig by controlling their attention in the right way. You know you can. You can really kind of alter somebody's nature by making them pay attention to

what you want them to pay attention to exactly. Uh, here's a fun example to Pointers can also be quite sacred in addition to or innate, So consider the the odd a ceremonial pointer, also known as a torah pointer, which in Jewish ritual is a means of following the text in a in a parchment torah scroll during a reading um. Part part of the practice is simply about following lines of texts as you read them, But there's also both a supernatural aspect to it and a in

a mundane aspect. So one idea is this is a holy text and we should not besmirch it or corrupt it or take away its purity by physically touching it. But also, uh, parchments are susceptible to damage via human fingers, via via the oil or other substances on human fingers, and therefore it makes sense to reduce the amount of contact that one has with a valuable text like this. And so this is where the torah pointer comes in.

They're typically made of silver, but sometimes other substances are used. Um. And you'll often find this, uh, this, this wand that's basically it's a short wand or rod and it is off and capped with a small hand, a small human hand with an index finger extended. This feels very interesting.

Something is going on here, yeah, with the wandes and and the kind of magical power we imbued to the finger pointing, especially within a religion where a text itself takes on such a sacred dimension that like, um, I wonder if having a little pointing object in this way is almost like itself an act of of bowing before

the text or kind of like showing reverence. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it makes me want to do a deeper dive or or talk to somebody with with more experience and um uh, you know judaic custom and um inhibriic ritual. But because because I mean the other side of it too is of course, when one is traditionally reading, many of you out there listening may do this as well. You may take your index finger and use it to read. You may go line by line with your index finger

physically touching the paper. Now Here the question I've never actually considered. I always just assumed that using of the index finger assists in reading comprehension, that people do that because it makes it easier to keep your place and follow along. I still, I guess assume that's probably true. But is that the case? Is it? Is it actually practically useful to do that, or is that something that we do out of instinct even though it doesn't affect

how our reading comprehension. I don't know. I've never I've never studied it. There may be, may may well be studies about it. I main my main experience with it it was, I know, a thing that I used to do either with my finger or with like a bookmark, and I was kind of encouraged not to do that, or you know, it's just the idea was presented that it's better better to read without those kind of uh aids, and then I kind of fell out of it and like then got to the point where I didn't need

it anyway. So yeah, I I I don't do that myself, but I don't know. Perhaps that there are people who still read by that, they swear by it and do that their whole lives. Yeah, that's an interesting question to me. Now,

maybe we can look for studies about that. Yeah, I mean, typography is also going to be a factor in all of this, too, right, I mean, depending on how the words are laid out, it may be easier to read certain text without, um some sort of pointing implement, whereas if you're dealing with a traditional uh you know, holy scroll, Uh, it may just be easier to to use some sort of pointing implement to follow your way through it. That

makes sense. Now, we've already touched on the laser pointer, which continues this tradition into the twentieth century and beyond. But we also have to consider as we reach the end here. The pointer or cursor on a computer, which much like the odd is often presented as a hand with an index finger outstretched. Sometimes it's an arrow, of course, but other times, or at least in some functions, um

of the cursor it becomes an index finger. And while a computer mouse is obviously not necessary to control a cursor, we have other means of controlling it. The mouse is an extreme only common interface. And in fact, I was reading a two thousand nine Scientific American article by Larry Greenmeyer titled the Origin of the Computer Mouse, and the author refers to the mouse. He may have been quoting someone here, but he refers to the mouse as a

pointing device. Well, yeah, I think there's some very interesting implied psychology going on here with with user design and and and the pointing gesture. So when you're pointing on a screen, you you might be pointing for the benefit of a third party, but you're often not, like you're often just by yourself looking at the screen. And yet you've got to have this thing to identify where it is you want to interact on the screen. And and one thing that that seems very interesting to me, is

that it the pointer, the mouse pointer. In most cases, to me, it seems that the the little pointer arrow turns into the finger pointing out with the index finger when you're ready to click a link on a web page. So when you want to go somewhere else, that's when you point with the finger. Yeah. When you want to essentially push a button, uh, to to activate something, to

touch something, that's when the finger comes into play. Oh yeah, maybe the going somewhere else is not a significant because I think it's buttons too, right, it's also like radiotomical buttons and things like that. Yeah. And then likewise, sometimes you have like the full hand for grabbing things and dragging things around, right, right, that's the that's the imperative

pointing from from infancy. Yeah, give me that. So anyway, bring and bring all this up is kind of just a consideration of where we've continued to go and just how deeply ingrained uh, pointing and touching with the index finger, how how all of that is key to not only the human experience, but then the human experience as it is it continues to take on the form of technology.

I'd be very interested to see some more studies about how how digital representations of control such as the mouse pointer are incorporated into extended body schema that we am at. And you know, the same way that we incorporate physical tools into our imagination of our extended body. Surely there's some degree to which we do that with things that are not even in physical space, but they're representational tools

on a screen. Yeah. Yeah, to remind everybody, body schema is basically your mental idea of what your body is, what its limits are, and when we engage in tool use, we update our body schema. So if one you know, you might have heard the saying, it's like, okay, this tool becomes an extension of my body. The sword becomes an extension of my body. That is very much what is happening when it when a sword or some other kind of tool is incorporated into our body schema. All right,

well there you have it. Our two part look at pointing in our you know, attempts to to unravel some of like what it is, where it comes from, how it varies from culture to culture, and how it how it applies to animals, and how it is or is not incorporated in our technology. So obviously we'd love to

hear from everyone about this topic. Everyone out there has has, uh you know, a lot of experience with the world of pointing or being pointed at, or digitally gesticulating with your hands, trying to point things out to your dog or your cat, or your horse, whatever you know, whatever animal you have interacted with. We would love to hear your experience. We'd love to hear about your details. Um in the meantime, well, first of all, we just hope

everybody's doing well out there. Everybody's being kind to each other out there. And if you want to support our show, the best thing you can do is uh well, tell people about it, but also rate, review and subscribe wherever you get this podcast huge things as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi, you can email us at contact

at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.