Talking with your (artificial) hands: communicative hand gestures as an implicit measure of embodiment

Summary When people talk, they move their hands to enhance meaning. Using accelerometery, we measured whether people spontaneously use their artificial limbs (prostheses) to gesture, and whether this behaviour relates to everyday prosthesis use and perceived embodiment. Perhaps surprisingly, one- and two-handed participants did not differ in the number of gestures they produced in gesture-facilitating tasks. However, they did differ in their gesture profile. One-handers performed more, and bigger, gesture movements with their intact hand relative to their prosthesis. Importantly, one-handers who gestured more similarly to their two-handed counterparts also used their prosthesis more in everyday life. Although collectively one-handers only marginally agreed that their prosthesis feels like a body-part, one-handers who reported they embody their prosthesis also showed greater prosthesis use for communication and daily function. Our findings provide a first empirical link between everyday prosthesis use habits and perceived embodiment, and a novel means for implicitly indexing embodiment.