‘The Gesture Limits Itself Intelligently to What Matters'

In David McNeill's book Hand and Mind he addresses the issues through detailed analyses of individual examples. He quotes the work of Arnheim, who wrote that 'the gesture limits itself intelligently to what matters' and McNeill argues that this is exactly what his analyses here demonstrate. A number of examples may help illustrate how the judges came to such a decision and how the encoding of size information relates to a number of other semantic features simultaneously encoded within the complex multidimensional gestures displayed. Low-importance size information, on the other hand, was information that was never rated by any of the judges as being in the top five most important size instances of a story. Iconic gestures may be multidimensional and complex but nevertheless, the gestures do represent the core dimensions of size in a sufficiently unambiguous manner such that decoders can successfully receive the information.