Dr. Marta Sibierska, currently the head of the Centre for Language Evolution Studies (CLES) at Nikolaus Copernicus University (NCU), will visit us in Lund and present the following exiting study. It develops the paradigm of experimental semiotics methodologically, and suggests interesting findings theoretically, concerning the importance of indexical signs, as well as props, a kind of iconic signs. If you wish to join us for the light dinner after the seminar, please send an email to Jordan by Sept 21.

Most experimental studies of the emergence of communication in the bodily-visual channel have two significant limitations. (I) They have restrictive setups where participants are "pinned" to a chair or a mark on the floor and prevented from moving too much. The room is typically "sterile", emptied of any objects that could act as confounds. Such setups set aside resources other than the body, making it impossible to use the surroundings to support communication. (II) Their meaning spaces are composed of single concepts, often objects or actions, rather than pragmatically complex, more ecologically valid "chunks". 

In the seminar, I will present a study, conducted together with Aleksandra Ćwiek, Antoni Żyndul, Juan Olvido Perea García, Monika Boruta, and Sławomir Wacewicz at CLES, that addresses both constraints. To unpin the participants, we used a centrally positioned 360-degree camera that let them move freely around the room and interact with its contents without leaving the recorded field. And instead of isolated concepts, our meaning space targeted settings, specifically spatial frames embedded in short stories, varied in size (small vs. large) and physical availability (proximate vs. displaced). In a referential game, 30 dyads communicated the settings through body movement alone. Bayesian analysis showed that large and displaced settings were harder to convey. Importantly, it was indexical representations, routinely marginalised in experimental semiotics, that was the strongest correlate of success besides size, and a third strategy – using objects in the room as props – arose spontaneously in a fifth of productions.