Gesture Type (Image Coding)

David McNeill · 1992

Hand and arm gestures coded by function — iconic, deictic, beat, or self-adaptor.

McNeill's taxonomy classifies gestures by what they do rather than what they look like, which is why it survives translation to image coding: an iconic gesture depicts content, a deictic points, a beat marks rhythm, and an adaptor manages the speaker's own state rather than communicating at all.

Intended for detection studies. Draw a box around the hand or hands performing the gesture — not the whole person — and code its function. Two hands doing different things get two boxes.

The hard limit of frame coding. Gesture is a movement, and a single frame shows a posture. An iconic gesture caught at rest looks like nothing; a beat is invisible without its stroke. Code from frames only what the frame really shows, and prefer a video timeline when the distinction between beat and iconic matters. This is the scale where the honest answer is most often "Partial".

Adaptors are the clinically interesting code. Self-touch — face touching, neck rubbing, hand wringing — is associated with discomfort and cognitive load, and it is the one category that is not addressed to the listener. Coding it separately keeps it out of the communicative-gesture count.

Severity is clarity. If the hand is blurred mid-stroke or leaving frame, that is Partial or Uncertain no matter how confident your reading of the context is.

Domains (4)

Iconic gestureICO

The hand depicts content — shape, size, direction of movement, or the form of an object or action being described.

Curated skill
Deictic gestureDEI

A point — at a person, an object, a body part, or an abstract location in the space in front of the speaker.

Curated skill
Beat gestureBEA

A short, rhythmic flick that marks emphasis or discourse structure without depicting anything.

Curated skill
Self-adaptorADP

Self-directed manipulation — touching the face or neck, wringing hands, adjusting clothing. Manages the speaker's own state rather than addressing the listener.

Curated skill
McNeill D. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. University of Chicago Press; 1992.

Widely used functional taxonomy from the published literature — free to operationalize with citation. Category definitions are Tagaroo's own operational wording for frame-level image coding; no text from the source volume is reproduced.