Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Gestures related to time can reveal implicit representations of the TIME is SPACE metaphor (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). While past research has shown that gestures illustrate the direction of future and past on timelines, no detailed analysis of timelines has been possible. Using the Kinect depth camera and body tracking technology, we tracked participants’ co-speech gestures while explaining time-related concepts. We present data collected with novel, relatively unsupervised Kinect-based methods that offer evidence similar to traditional gesture-coding methods and could provide the opportunity for novel theoretical findings.